Federico Fellini's retrospective.

[cubanmiamiboy]

Tonight I made it to Fellini's "Giulietta degli Spiriti"-(1965). Fellini's cycle started last week in Little Havana, but I wasn't able to make it until tonight due to work. To bee completely honest, there was just nothing much that was too fresh or relevant in this fantasy film that takes us into the head of Fellini's actress wife Giulietta Masina who plays another Giulietta, a bored wealthy bourgeois Roman housewife in her mid-30s with no children.

The film opens as Giulietta prepares an anniversary party, where during a session held by a clairvoyant she learns that she can hear otherworld voices. She then escapes into her imagination as she retreats into the past, present and future to give her routine life more meaning. As a side story, Giulietta is most concerned her hubby is having an affair after she hears him speaking another woman's name in bed. Disillusioned with her reality and trying to escape from a marriage that is failing, Giulietta comes to believe more and more in the spirit world.

The film is somehow taken over by Sandra Milo, Giulietta's exotic and liberated high-living neighbor, who plays three bizarre roles and manages to be strange but uninteresting in all three roles. Anyway, it could be either because of being so tired after my long work session or something else, but I gotta say I found myself bored with the film fantasy sequences and not overly impressed with all the freak show sequences and dips into surrealism.

Next, Amarcord.

[dirac]

The film is somehow taken over by Sandra Milo, Giulietta's exotic and liberated high-living neighbor, who plays three bizarre roles and manages to be strange but uninteresting in all three roles. Anyway, it could be either because of being so tired after my long work session or something else, but I gotta say I found myself bored with the film fantasy sequences and not overly impressed with all the freak show sequences and dips into surrealism.

I had the same reaction, more or less. Not my favorite Fellini.

[bart]

Not my favorite Felllini either. There are many biographical and autobiographical impulses in this film. So i helps to have seen Giulietta Masina when she was a young woman, in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria especially . To know the luminous Masina in her prime, in films that show Fellini at his best, helped me to sympathize more with the older woman of Juliet of the Spirits. It also helped me overlook silliness and pretentiousness that Fellini loaded onto the later film. (Even the color photography is over-the-top.)

Hope you enjoy Amarcord, Cristian. My favorite bit -- the local Fascists, out-of-shape bodies stuffed into tight black shirts and trousers, sprinting through the streets of Rimini. Also Gradisca, a warm and touching character. I like Fellini when he's mixing satire and sentimentality, but not going overboard in either direction. Amarcord, for me, sustains the balance. Not unlike Chaplin.