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Like Antonioni, Fellini came to the use of colour film comparatively late. In an interview with Cahiers du cinema in March 1965, the director expressed at length his belief that making a colour film was ‘an impossible exercise’. However, he had already shot his segment of portmanteau film Boccaccio ‘70 (1961) in colour and had decided that despite his misgivings, his new project would be shot the same way. ‘In my mind’, he concluded, ‘Giulietta degli spiriti was born in colour.’ It is beautifully shot. Departing from monochrome, Fellini uses his new palette brilliantly, the bright blues, reds and yellows concocting a dreamy, ethereal ambience rarely matched in any of his subsequent films.
As with La Strada (1954) and Le Notti di Cabiria (1957), Giulietta degli spiriti was written and conceived especially for Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina. In a film in which past, present and future collide in a whirlpool of fantasy and imagination, Fellini’s protagonist – a repressed bourgeois housewife – attempts to grapple with her neuroses as she is besieged by a dizzying, often bizarre collection of ‘spirits’ (including nuns and Nazi generals) as well as an eccentric group of friends and relatives.
Despite often being overshadowed by more widely-known Fellini classics such as La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1962), Giulietta degli spiriti (1965) undoubtedly stands as a significant film in the director’s oeuvre. Much like the five young men in Fellini’s bleakly comic chronicle of middle-class male ennui I Vitelloni (1953), Giulietta is a character longing for a sense of purpose and direction. Both films are now available fully remastered from newly-restored prints.

 

Pasquale Iannone on 8th July 2005
View all 52 of Pasquale Iannone's reviews