In 1965, the year he filmed and released ‘Giulietta degli spiriti‘, Federico Fellini had long since ended his neorealist period and had made two of his best-known (perhaps even his best) films – ‘La dolce vita’ and ‘8 1/2’. His biographers claim that his relationship with his wife and muse (at least from the first part of his career) – Giulietta Masina – was in a complicated phase. The formidable actress had not been cast in either of the two previous great successes. ‘Giulietta degli spiriti‘ would therefore have been a kind of compensation because it gave Giulietta Masina a major role again and perhaps also a kind of act of penance, if not conjugal at least artistic, because unlike the previous films, the perspective and attitude are intended to be explicitly feminist. It was also Fellini‘s first color film. The Italian director would from then on add a dimension to his visual universe. The result is a film that is very Fellini-esque in appearance, but not as coherent and expressive as the best films that preceded it. Had the decline begun, which would be long and marked by a few significant films, but a decline nonetheless?
The heroine of the film is also called Giuletta. She is a rich woman, one of those who have all the money and all the time in the world at her disposal. She is over 40, while her husband, Giorgio, seems to be over 50. He is a very busy man, almost always away from home, with good excuses for absenting nights and days and forgetting his wife’s birthday. For the woman with big eyes and a candid face, Giorgio is the love of her life and perhaps the only man she has ever known. Giuletta seems a little different from her surroundings, conservative in her clothing, reluctant in assuming the eccentric and decadent behaviors of her friends or her new neighbor, a blonde and exuberant woman. However, she believes in spirits, which she invokes in seances or visits all kinds of gurus who sell advice on spiritualistic debauchery. When she has reason to suspect that Giorgio is cheating on her, she seeks advice and refuge in this alternative world.
The character of Giuletta is one of the most interesting ones created by Fellini. Practically, everything we see on screen is the reflection of her visions, dreams, memories, and experiences. Reality, nightmares, and memory meet in a fantastic and colorful world, haunted by spirits and the anxieties of the woman whose real universe is about to fall apart. But is it really a feminist film? The vision of women’s feelings is Fellini‘s – surrealist, a tribute to psychoanalysis, with a subliminal social commentary. Giuletta is obviously unhappy, but is she at least satisfied with her own decisions? Actress Giulietta Masina delivers a performance that is even deeper and more sincere in this film than in any of her other films. We can admire Fellini‘s unbridled visual imagination, the fantasy and nightmare universe he creates around his heroine, identify themes and quotes from his other films and enjoy Nino Rota‘s music, but this film is more than everything else Giulietta Masina‘s film. The sadness in the eyes of the woman who has passed young age and is about to lose her love, that is, her world, will haunt us for a long time.