FEDERICO FELLINI’S JULIET OF THE SPIRITS “Why can’t you believe we all love you?”

 

© 2014 by James Clark

      In the 1950s, actress Giulietta Masina starred in two films deriving from her husband, Federico Fellini’s, internationally consequential cinematic reflections. In one of them (La Strada) she richly embodied a young woman having run away to join a (ramshackle) circus act; in the other (Nights of Cabiria), she brought to glowing life a low-rent prostitute. Each of these movie charmers came replete with a kinetic repertoire directly transmitting not simply a strange gusto for life but an unmistakably (though undefined) dangerous gusto. Fellini’s researches into that danger came—after the steps that were named La Dolce Vita and 8½–upon a means to exploit Masina’s former effervescence along lines of totally extinguishing it, giving us a figure bereft of kinetic/carnal cogency, namely, the Juliet of the movie in question here (from 1965). The upshot is a cinematic experience remarkably hard to warm up to, its attendant riot of sybaritic flare-ups notwithstanding. This package has inadvertently dragged along, for the sake of scuttlebutt in lieu of comprehension, a tide of marital and Jungian and Surrealist baggage, not to mention a charge of creative comeuppance for a lazy but canny millionaire. (As to that latter point, it is ironic that producing this attenuated horror vehicle nearly bankrupted the supposedly play-it-safe fat cat. That Jonathan Glazer’s recent minefield, Under the Skin [2013], could be seen as featuring a vastly [though plausibly] changed Samantha hitherto from Her, excitingly speaks to the endless investigative dimensions of the problematic of avant-garde film, which does not abandon history for the sake of the scientism of classically imprisoned perceptual phenomena.)

Masina’s was an expressive genius that, by and large, could not do without an open throttle applied to a vast range of physical, emotive developments. Shut down that range, and what is left is not merely subdued but embalmed. Of course Fellini derived clarification of his motives by way of Jungian theories and practices; of course his marriage to Masina included much aberration (one of the foils to Juliet’s chilly miasma, namely, next-door neighbor, Suzy, is played by Fellini’s long-standing mistress, Sandra Milo [playing that part initially in 8 ½]); of course in later years he loved and would not dream of restraining Surrealist design—his color feast, in this his first departure from the venerable assurances of classical black and white cinematography, having been piqued by Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Juliet’s range of ridiculously defensive hats being backhanded references to those French umbrellas, as were the flamboyant sun hats of Suzy and her fast-track friends, opening thereby a spectrum of calculative havens exposed to impious and life-threatening energies. But Juliet of the Spirits is not primarily a narrative to be enlarged upon by any of these theses. The hopelessness of Juliet’s marriage is self-evident in the first few minutes. There is no powerful suspense about where this crisis would leave her—a sanitized, cloistral recluse treading through perfect parkland, in stark contrast to the protagonist of 8 ½, joining a parade (at its end), including those tormentors he has come to love, somewhat. If Juliet of the Spirits is to be seen as compelling at a level commensurate to Fellini’s long roster of masterworks, we are, I think, required to regard Masina’s adamant disfigurement, embodying Juliet, as the true subject of the work—a film, thereby, to be embraced as divulging a chilling dilemma to take under the skin. (Masina, it is not that hard to understand, would be first and foremost an adventuresome artist, neither tormented nor humiliated by a partner she was to stay close to for another thirty years, until their almost simultaneous deaths.)

To get a foot in the door toward her purchase upon this project, let’s notice how Fellini sets the optics to give his diminutive (under five feet tall) protagonist a soupcon of Shirley Temple (later, in Fellini’s Roma, he’ll bring to bear Judy Garland, the Andrews Sisters and Fred and Ginger). The first scene is about her overseeing servants (those Depression-era baubles) preparing a special, intimate dinner for her husband, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Of course he’s forgotten the date and has brought home some of his party animal friends. But what we want to zero in on is his response to the surprise. He gives his little Shirley (who asks, “Do you love me?”) a demonstrative kiss, lifts her up as though she were a little kid, spins her around like a midway ride and then takes her around their living room and kitchen in a sedate display of that bellwether of domestic soundness, the foxtrot. (Were it Shirley, there’d be heartfelt fun and pizzazz; and we’d exclaim, “Isn’t she something, considering her age!” But this is a grown woman, and her motions here are strictly limp.) Both look as if they’d placed faith in cosmetic surgery—his outcome dovetailing with a playboy roguishness (Out in the yard during the anniversary event, he jokes with a chum, “Lying is more heroic…” who assures him, “She doesn’t realize she’s living with a hero!”); her result coming in as Barbie’s well-preserved grandmother. Juliet’s own mother has seen to it that she looks a bit like Anita Ekberg, certainly seeming no older than her daughter. The former tells her daughter, through the schoolgirl trance she finds opportune, “Why don’t you put on some makeup… Take better care of yourself…” There is a moment when our housewife, running a deficit for all to see, catches up with a TV program offering advice on how to develop youthful, attractive eyes through practicing moving the eyeballs in unison to the extremities of the eye socket. Masina was very adept and charmingly expressive at this, in La Strada. Here she demonstrates the exercise for her servants, and the magic is gone. Only a mechanical facility remains. That recalls her chattering, at the nearby beach, about when she was a child being able to elicit pleasing imagery by closing her eyes. “It went on for years, and then, nothing…” The woman on TV had promised, “Give it 15 days, and your eyes will sparkle!”

Of course she hears her Giorgio calling to another woman in his dreams; of course she puts an agency on the case; and of course she’s told, “Nothing is irreparable…” And with that last upbeat bromide, let’s see how the film puts Juliet under surveillance and whether “Nothing is irreparable” applies to her and her ilk.

As with cosmetic surgery being a given at her social strata, Juliet readily accesses a range of mood experts to get her over the hump. (During her “zany” adventures in this regard, she takes on the aura of Disney-star Annette [sans breasts], her Southern California leisure togs so perfectly inserted into the design that we almost expect a visit from the Absent-Minded Professor or the Love Bug. We’ve first seen Juliet from behind, dressing for the sputtering anniversary gala. There she was peevish about the clothing ensembles she tried on, telling her servants, “I’m sick of this dress. Throw it out! And this hat!” She tries on several wigs, first a red one, then a blonde one; and she settles for a dull as dishwater brunette coiffure you’d never see her forever-blonde mother considering.) During the invasion of Giorgio’s coterie, Juliet points to herself in the bathroom mirror and orders, “Don’t be silly and start crying!” In addition to the sexual thrum of the visitors, who know her well, they all (with the exception of the two guys out in the yard) heavily subscribe to séances and Juliet settles into the likes of, “I feel a new presence” (from the likes of glamorous Val, who, as events spin along, tends to act as Juliet’s guide [personal trainer] through the paraphernalia-heavy exercises. Juliet faints in face of SOS-like gambits aimed at disembodied “Iris” and “Olaf”(prompting Giorgio’s scolding, “Adults playing such games!”); but, a couple of days later (Juliet and her two servants stringing peppers for winter) Val drops by to give her the heads up about a touring enlightenment show that can’t be missed. (Bhisma, big in the US—“…a man/woman… He can change your life!”) This time Juliet doesn’t faint, but the babble coming out of Bhisma and her fey assistants confuses and then annoys her and she leaves them with a hardened, cheated-customer timbre. This incident is arresting for its swarming verbiage that might once have had something to do with serious life, but now fills the air like an eviscerated string of golden oldies delivered by shabby businessmen who once touched fire. “The enlightened person sees unity and multiplicity at once… To be happy you must be in combat…Truth is close and far away at the same time…” The old lead singer (Bhisma) goes into convulsions; but before that, Juliet self-pityingly grabs and runs with one of her vacuous precepts, namely, “Love is a job.”

Driving home in a nasty rainstorm with Val and others of the entourage, all asleep, Juliet (still fed up with the notion that love should be a dilemma) thinks back to a scandal perpetrated by her loose-cannon-professor-grandfather, his flying off in a biplane with a buxom circus performer (“A beautiful lady makes me more pious’) while the Headmaster screams into their take-off, “Professor, stop! In the name of God!” She goes on to tell, bitterly, the unconscious spiritualists (At Bhisma’s show a lady has a breakdown and one of the roadies remarks, “Same thing happened to her in Stockholm!”), “He vanished for two years. Then he came back as happy as ever.” This resentful thought is held on to during a subsequent spate of slick sayings by Giorgio’s oily, handsomely patrician client, Jose (“He owns one of the biggest bull farms in Spain”)—“There’s nothing to life if you take away nights like this… Everything becomes clear, plausible… You love Lorca’s poetry, no? What matters is the fluidity of the movements…A calculated spontaneity!”—as catalyzed by another childhood reverie pertaining to that scarily impulsive granddad. Kindergarten (Shirley-age) Juliet is in a show the former wouldn’t touch, in fact depicting the martyrdom of Christians. She’s arrested by the Romans and tied to what is supposed to be a bed set afire. Granddad comes onstage (“What are we, cannibals?”), unties her and they leave (Juliet in tears). The real-time Juliet has no time for the motives of that old demon, being far more impressed by the Headmaster’s imprecation, his angel-winged hit in shambles, “You’ll make a madwoman out of her!” (Grandpa scolds her, “You let them do anything!” As she was getting ready to go onstage a nun [with totally covered face] praises her, “Juliet, you have such innocent eyes.” Also, no doubt, around that time, she had animated eyes like those of Giulietta Masina in the 1950s. Though at one point Juliet tries to convince herself that this power outage [associated with the one in effect at Bhisma’s gig] is a very recent phenomenon, we have been provided with evidence that it set in for good at a much earlier time. [Like her namesake, she and her love for life died young.] Jose asks her to take off her sunglasses [it’s late at night], and in her doing so the romance level plunges. After she’s gone to bed, she hears Jose on the patio and her eyes are caught by a shaft of light. Spanish Eyes that don’t have the spark of true love; but, instead, as her whole repertoire bends to, the dull glimmer of curiosity and, hopefully, escape.) She recalls with satisfaction her big scene at the nuns’ theatre, before the interruption: A Roman says, “Your faith is against the Empire;” she replies, “I won’t betray the salvation of my soul.”

Jose has brought his hosts a present, a telescope. Rather than plumb the beauties and mysteries of the skies, Giorgio and Juliet use it to do some peeping into the life of their next door neighbor, Suzy, a flamboyantly sexy and notoriously promiscuous center of agitation—as played by the notorious Sandra Milo (a Venus not without sensual range, but so satisfied with only one kind of intercourse as to take her place, along with tedious Juliet and Giorgio, as a Venus Flytrap doing her bit to make the universe just that much deadlier. Is this movie not the perfect primer for Under the Skin?) Juliet does manage to more fully satisfy her curiosity about Suzy (bringing back to home base her wayward black cat that fell down an uncovered well on Juliet’s grounds [going somewhere neither woman would be interested in]). Suzy does have a well, of sorts, attached to her bedroom with its mirrored ceiling. “After we make love we slide down [to a pool]… Take off your clothes and come on in.” Juliet rather prudishly says, “No, thank you.” She has become an object of curiosity to her host, who takes her to a tree house nearby and proposes, “Let’s undress and sunbathe naked.” That gambit, as with Juliet’s whole misadventure, is met with a politely negative response that was a foregone conclusion—the point being to assimilate the virulence of impasse which a bland everyday surface does not begin to reveal. Juliet then asks Suzy if she’d ever considered marriage. The answer is a quick, “No, never!” And while the little neighbor speaks at length about her own situation, “I was all his and he was all mine,” Suzy moves on to less boring matters, signalling by mirror reflection to a couple of guys on the pathway below. She probably didn’t even hear the culmination of Juliet’s Hollywood precepts: “All I wanted was to be with him… He became my whole world.” Suzy sends her on her way, politely insisting, “Come anytime…” The perfect marriage melting down like one of Shirley’s ice-cream cones, she crashes one of the countless parties next door and makes it all the way to that mirrored ceiling and the bed and Suzy’s handsome young godchild, before her face begins to twitch and she hallucinates scenes from Dante’s Inferno. Terror now filling those once-lively eyes, she rushes away, her having imagined Iris telling her, “Suzy is your teacher. Listen to her, follow her…” no longer a credible resource.

Now haunted at home by horrific images of grossness, shock and torture, and crying out, “Forgive me! It won’t happen again!” Juliet looks up one more expert in hopes of lightening her baggage. A woman therapist (Val calls her, “The American Doctor,” a little echo of Tati’s American Postal Service in Jour de Fete) with the no-nonsense name, Dr. Miller, drops by, knowing this precinct to be a bonanza for selling advice about how to live. Juliet complains, “My life is full of people talking.” Though this Miller grinds a pretty standard flour, she does manage to take her patient into the adjacent woods, and go on to make an incisive observation. “All is peaceful and quiet. But you’re not. Why? … What are you afraid of? May I answer for you? You’re afraid of ending up alone and being abandoned, of your husband leaving you. But what you really want with all your heart is to be left alone and for your husband to leave…” Like the American Postal Service way back when, Dr. Miller’s is an expertise comprising hits and misses. Solitude would suit our protagonist’s ascetic priorities. But marriage with gratifying optics would suit her greedy little ego. That night, after the interview, she rushes to the home of the woman of Giorgio’s dreams and addresses her by phone (she not being home): “This is Giorgio’s wife. Are you afraid?” (Her successful rival, far more gracious than she, tells her, “I don’t enjoy other people’s defeat, and I doubt we have anything to say to each other…” During the party at Suzy’s, Juliet hears from a friend of that woman that she’s very beautiful. To which she cheaply replies, “Also a slut, right?”) Solitude in the mode of disinterestedness has been and will forever be beyond her. At that same therapeutic gathering just mentioned, she learns from a lawyer friend that she can rest assured that, legally, Giorgio is “done for.” (Therefore the deluxe servicing can go on forever.) As thus factoring in the compensations of being a divorcee both cloistered and free to indulge her sweet tooth for a preservatives-loaded version of New Age spirituality, Juliet would not in fact be the brave and honest woman Dr. Miller takes her for, when she closes her analysis with this flourish: “You think you’re afraid. In truth your only fear is to be happy again…” “Happy again,” as exposed to not only the beauties but also the deadly dangers of a thrust of energy not for cowards, will never   cover our protagonist’s experience. And, as such, she’s a prim and proper boor, posing, along with her numerous soul-mates, a special and endless war. With Giorgio making an exit drawing upon PR-savvy euphemisms (“Frankly I need a little time by myself…”), she watches a TV commercial running to, “Our happiness has only one name!” Her treading (seen at an unapproachable distance) toward those woodlands would fix her henceforth, till the day she dies, in fact (the day she died in truth being a generation ago). With the finality of her escaping the bruising business of history (Suzy tells her, “I love fighting!”) sinking in, she squelches both the siren call of suicide (posed by the vision of a friend during her schooldays having drowned herself) and the images of the patronizing contempt of her gorgeous mother. “You’re not real. Go away!”

There is a heavy but only intermittently cogent overtone of Surrealist eventuation here to embolden the viewer to tell Juliet, “You’re not real. Go away!” This is admittedly pretty rough handling of a figure we were eager to embrace. And think what risks Fellini himself was taking by insinuating hard truths such as these. As with his lugubrious Roma story the plunge to joys (however dark) here is not along his real-life mistress’ water slide but along a panoply of the work of Surrealist risk-takers as taking sustenance from the discoveries of many endeavors long ago, and more recently, with respect to a sadly rare form of “happy again” (the rarity of which the reckless aliens of Under the Skin want to address). At the Bhisma touring show, Juliet comes upon staff wielding flashlights to offset a power failure. On receiving a sharp beam straight in the face, she covers her eyes with her red gloves and we dash for a moment to Marcel Vertes’ Surrealist Harper’s Bazaar cover for a truly mysterious and spellbinding entrepreneur, namely, Elsa Schiaparelli, aka, “Shocking Schiaparelli.” At Suzy’s party, Juliet meets “Lola,” an Anouk Aimee-type brunette dressed in a swirl of garish black feathers, rather than a black boa. She leads a group of party dolls. She tells our protagonist, “We simulate the atmosphere of a brothel…” Juliet confronts her about one of her friends, Gabriella, Giorgio’s thrill, making clear her contempt for such entities, and those who dream them up.

Big-hearted Suzy harbors a suicidal teen-ager, and, with Juliet on hand, already having elicited from Suzy’s grandmother—“…she hasn’t slept in five years. She sits here and sees all…”—“What’s wrong, my dear?” the girl inadvertently gets her giddy hostess to frame bemusingly the nub of our being exposed for two hours to a collection of pathologically arresting dullards: “Why can’t you believe we all love you?”