Wherefore Art Thou, Juliet?
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Wherefore Art Thou, Juliet? If it were just for a handful of silver, just for a riband to stick in his coat, we could forgive Fellini that he left us. Where money is the...
...Since her Catholic childhood, she has been having visions, or, more exactly, daydreams, in many of which she identifies herself with both a martyred saint whom she portrayed in a school pageant, and a classmate who drowned herself at 15 out of unhappy love...
...Now there is an immediate and aggressive bit of bad taste in filming your wife's story, having her play herself in it, and appending the moral that if her husband cheats on her, she must endure it stoically— indeed, find in her acceptance of it her own liberation...
...The sanctimonious head of the detective agency is always shown disguised as a priest, but whether this is meant to be a comment on religion, Catholicism, or the clergy is anybody's guess...
...Hard-core intellect is not one of the artist's requisites: Yeats never had it, and would have been better off not presuming that he did...
...The colors are brilliant, precise, and tasteless—it matters little whether intentionally or not...
...More recently, she has been dabbling in spiritism and consulting mediums and gurus in the hope of finding what one of the spirit voices proclaims, "amore per tutti," including herself...
...The history of this downfall and its various symptoms I have already described in my review of 8V2 (NL, August 5, 1963...
...And there is the matter of efficient control of the form...
...More precisely, as 8V2 was Fellini's aggrandized autobiography, so Juliet is his embellished telling of his wife's own story—as it were, his Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas...
...Giulietta's visions are supposed to comment on her marital and mental state, but they consist of comic-strip figures (in New York, Fellini called on the publisher of Captain Marvel comic books) and pop-art props (he also visited Claes Oldenburg in his studio) that remain luridly opaque...
...Sensuality and spiritualism are, apparently, ridiculed equally as possible solutions, yet Fellini cannot refrain from drenching them with what looks like a genuinely felt, albeit sophomoric, relish and glamor...
...Federico Fellini is a natural, and why not...
...Fellini's lens, "cette prunelle autant que I'ocean profonde," as Victor Hugo, in a particularly visionary moment, foresaw it, has dwindled to a pool: at best a fashionable swimming pool...
...As concerns the vitality, yes, Ruggero Mastroianni is a superb editor, and the cutting, most saliently in the bustling opening scene, does create a bogus animation, as do also the clever camera set-ups...
...There are other influences: girl friends who propel her toward occultism or sexuality, an ebullient courtesan next door who stages slow-motion orgies for senescent appetites, an American lady-psychiatrist who urges Giulietta to leave her husband, and a Spanish business associate of her husband's who spouts absurd pseudo-poetry in praise of what he takes to be her marital bliss...
...Besides, behind the unstated answers, there should be a set of values, all the more compelling for remaining implicit...
...Again, the lengthy episodes with the neighboring cocotte add almost nothing to our understanding of anything at all...
...her beautiful, domineering, icily contemptuous mother...
...Where money is the cause of defection, it may yet, in time, be the source of liberation...
...It is heartbreaking to listen to Fellini discoursing on the new sensibility, the new dispensation, his latest films have heralded...
...But her actions fail: She succeeds neither in becoming unfaithful herself at a neighborly orgy, nor in talking her husband or his mistress out of going on a trip together...
...Relationships that might be significant, such as little Giulietta's to her grandfather and her mother, are not developed, but used as convenient and woefully unconvincing counters...
...what the film esthetically adds up to is the incestuous marriage of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar...
...Worst of all is the final cop-out, when, with just one dream, Giulietta manages to free herself, presto magico, from a lifetime's guilts and fears...
...But before we get to the superabundance of bad taste, let us recapitulate the exiguous plot...
...Which brings us to the eroticism: Except for a brief shot of two young bucks being drawn up in a basket into a tree house by a strutting, semi-nude strumpet—the camera angled upward and the two heads rising toward the proudly jutting woman's crotch—which has some grit to it, the sexuality is of the onanistic schoolboy, or Playboy, variety...
...But where the emphasis is all on glossiness and chic, the more you succeed, the more you fail...
...Even Fellini's last stronghold, the performances he was able to elicit, the penetration of life that he could accomplish through them, has crumbled...
...The scenes at the detective agency have a certain zest to them, but the husband's relationship with the other woman, as it emerges from films, slides, and tapes, chiefly provides an excuse for a little tangential satire and a few bravura effects, as when the rising wife's shadow falls on the screen within a screen displaying In defending 81/2 against my attack, Dwight Macdonald argued in Esquire that it is not necessary for an artist to resolve problems as long as he states them properly...
...Thus fell Fellini...
...To begin with, Giulietta is just too sketchy and lame a figure to make us care about her...
...She does, however, have a final vision or dream in which she rejects her mother's authority, unties her little-girl self from the blazing gridiron, and thus, presumably, frees herself from both earthly and spiritual authority...
...at worst, a cesspool...
...And when a once-struggling artist sells out, we view it with a measure of indulgence, as we would a hungry man stealing a loaf of bread from Huntington Hartford...
...It has been correctly observed that Juliet is a woman's 816...
...and her two sisters— one sexy, one elegant—whom the dumpy Giulietta cannot begin to approximate...
...There are those who have defended Juliet of the Spirits for its sheer beauty, or vitality, or eroticism...
...All very true, but the question is how important is the problem to which the artist addresses himself, how acutely does he set forth (if he is dealing with a dramatic medium) the alternative solutions, and how much light does he shed along the way on the human condition...
...But Juliet of the Spirits is a dreadful film: a little less arrogant, but no less vacuous and even tawdrier than 8V2...
...the coloristic revel can best be described as The House of Revlon Rides Again...
...Can a dose of benzedrine turn a bony, narcissistic fashion model into a great lover...
...they merely create a milieu with overtones of everything from Sade and Flaming Creatures (part of which Fellini has seen) to accounts of Hugh Hefner's Chicago Xanadu, and enable the costume and set designer to have the kind of orgiastic fun no one on screen or in the audience is having...
...On most of these counts Fellini failed egregiously in 8V2, and, again, in the present film...
...furthermore, her expressionistic miming is appropriate to wandering waifs, but not to wealthy, middle-aged wives.the husband's gambols with his mistress...
...She walks out into the woods surrounding her villa...
...The White Sheik, on a smaller scale, is scarcely less admirable...
...Neither what made the rather dapper husband (who looks like a smoother version of F F.) marry this unalluring woodchuck of a wife, nor what he really wants from her now, is made clear...
...she has become a free woman—heaven knows why, how, or to what purpose...
...Fellini, alas, has sold out not for lucre, which can be acquired, but for intellect, which cannot be commandeered...
...and Giulietta Masina who, when she was younger, was capable of touching, though limited, enactments of low-life characters (in The White Sheik, La Strada, Cabiria) has, with age, become too unprepossessingly ordinary...
...the troublesome visions have left her...
...The central problem of the marriage itself is never gone into...
...This precis does not begin to dojustice to the disjointedness, irrelevancies, pretensions and gaudiness 3 2 of the film...
...And whatever went for that film goes double for Juliet of the Spirits, Feilini's 17...
...Giulietta is also the battleground of three family influences: memories of her grandfather, a freethinking Garibaldian activist, who indignantly stopped the school play midway through his granddaughter's flaming ascent to heaven, and who himself flew off in a rickety biplane with a racy circus bareback rider...
...But what good is vitality where there is no life...
...But the tone is uncertain: The hermetic hermaphrodite is clearly a fraud, yet predicts accurately words to be spoken that evening by the Spanish visitor...
...that, in fact, some of the greatest artists never supplied answers...
...once again, Fellini is simply carried away with the visual and satirical possibilities of an ambience, and digresses con amore...
...Johnson had it, and Rasselas and Irene show how little it availed him as an artist...
...As for the beauty, Gianni di Venanzo is a magnificent cinematographer and Pietro Gherardi is one of the master costume and set designers...
...But somewhere in the middle of La Dolce Vita Fellini had to go and discover intellect with a capital, nay, a monolithic I, and the harm, the possibly irreparable harm, was done...
...Giulietta, a plain little upper-middle-class wife, feels obscurely that her husband is slipping away from her...
...Vitelloni is a masterpiece, one of the 10 or 12 great films ever made...
...Among the performers, only Caterina Boratto, as the mother, and Valentina Cortese, as an addlepated friend, make an impression...
...If it is indeed a new dispensation, it seems eminently dispensable...
...Thus the various seances, voices, visions, consultations with an androgynous Oriental clairvoyant fail to illuminate Giulietta's or anyone else's situation...
...Giulietta loves her husband desperately, amorphous a figure though he be, and only when the garish people from a detective agency confront her with incontrovertible evidence of his infidelity does she attempt to act...
...All of Fellini's films from Variety Lights to La Dolce Vita contain strokes of genius, which, so far, only about seven or eight filmmakers have equaled...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 24
