JULIET OF THE SPIRITS

Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits is a hysterical act of confusion. Having so stated, I will address myself to comments of other critics, who have been in this elevator before me; and having done so, I can go on to some personal specifics I have not seen elsewhere in print.

Ray Bradbury, who reviewed this film for a California newspaper, and conveyed his opinions in conversation to me, made the valid point that, in previous Fellini films, the maestro dealt with hurricanes at the eyes of which were human beings. Cabiria, Zampano, Marcello—each was a fixed centerpost around which all the madnesses danced. But the reactions were those of the principals, and what happened to them mattered a great deal. In Juliet, as Bradbury phrases it, "The gargoyles have taken over." The horned gods have deserted Notre Dame to caper and cavort, while the priests are outside in the rain, staring in. Giulietta Masina as Juliet wanders semivacuously through a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, grinning gamely and praying for sudden sunshine. What happens, happens; not to her as much as to the film itself.

Another critic (whose name, I'm sorry, escapes me) made the comment that an overuse of technique does not represent expertise and boldness, but an escape into flummery and flapdoodle. That the best art, the most carefully-constructed art, is that which does not look like art at all, which looks effortless (e.g., Fred Astaire dancing, Walt Kelly drawing, Vonnegut or Sturgeon writing) until you try it. The technique should not be apparent to the eye. The bones of method and construction should not show through. Another valid point, in the light of Juliet, for there the technique is constantly omnipresent—Fellini somewhere in the projection booth reminding us this is his first color film, and look at the coy uses of same.

While I almost entirely accept this point of criticism as bravely and succinctly tendered, in its aspects of truth, I reserve a caprice or two of dissenting opinion on grounds of past love.

Fellini has delighted and moved me too often to suspect him of total bravura, and nothing else.

But having only recently seen Modesty Blaise, with its surfeit of Losey technique . . . The Ipcress File and Darling and Help! and The Knack with theirs . . . I am compelled to accept the truth of the comment. Trick technique is on the rise; and while there may be those who contend A Thousand Clowns was flawed because it was a stage play filmed as a stage play with occasional returns to "the filmed portion of our show," I agree that crotch shots through keyholes as in The Ipcress File cannot hold a klieg to straight-on filming of Robards and Barbara Harris discussing the ethical structure of the universe.

To be precise, I am not really sure what I think of Juliet, which is not really the way to come away from a film. The fault may well be mine, even though it isn't confusion, merely indecision. But this I do know:

Fellini has come too far away from the writer as a necessary tool of the film medium. All well and good to say one is setting his innermost psyche down on film, very nice: but where is the story? It is still—and always will be—the job of the storyteller to communicate a pattern of events, a progression of character development, a sense of order and ethic. No matter what medium, the storyteller is the minstrel. He must tell his tale, not merely dazzle with pyrotechnics. Fellini seems to have fallen into the trap (though there are four credits listed for screenplay) of plot-by-committee. He shoots as he goes along, and as a consequence what he has told here is a traditional soap opera: the cheating husband, the wife on the verge of psychosis, the search for meaning, and the eventual realization that life alive is better than life half-dead, living in delusions and dreams. Stella Dallas did it regularly on the radio, and the chief difference between Stella and Juliet is that Miss Masina had the benefits of a charming Nino Rota soundtrack behind her.

To address myself to the acting, for a moment, much of it seems to me of the "momentary impetus" school. People couple and grin for apparently whimsical reasons, having very little to do with the continuity of the skimpy plot. And this is unquestionably not Miss Masina's kind of picture. In earlier films she was the compleat gamine, a street urchin with a wry and winning smile. Here, she is a weary middle-aged woman, and the revelation is not a charming one. I do not care to see her standing there empty as assorted noxious fluids and vapors are emptied into her.

In a way, she represents in this film what Mia Farrow represents on Peyton Place: a necessary vacuum whose removal would impel the instant implosion of all the other hysterical elements spinning around her.

One can never dismiss Fellini. His work is too important. Even when failing, he does so brilliantly. But I would like to offer the suggestion to Fellini, with all due respect, that the time for self-indulgence has passed. He has plumbed his own libido, and sucked out his own id. We have seen his secret dreams and fantasies. We have seen his wife's secret world. I pray to God he has no children, for if he does, then we may look forward to their adolescent fantasies. Or, lacking offspring, perhaps we will see the dream life of Fellini's housekeeper, his agent, his barber.

There is too little pure genius doled out in an eon to allow its waste on essentially unworthy projects. Yes, Fellini uses color brilliantly; yes, he knows film as few other directors ever have; yes, he is still the maestro and one cataclysm is not sufficient to sink Atlantis. But there is a cautionary note sounded by the direction and attitude of a film like Juliet. It is a discordancy, apparently tuned to the Lesters, the Schlesingers, the Furies, and Fellini.

It is a back-turning on the past, on the validity of already proved methods. It is a losing-touch with the roots of the medium, with the lessons learned by men who were neither afraid nor untalented. And to scoff, as this film seems to do, is to play the clown.

Fellini is too good for that. And to quote Lautrec: "A man may play the fool once, and be excused the role; but if he play it more than once, it must be assumed he enjoys the part."

Cinema / July 1966