CINEMA
Meet the Wife
IF Antonioni shows us the Italy of Downs, in 'which everything is in almost excruciatingly exquisite taste, Fellini shows us the Italy of the picture magazines, the vulgarian world in which almost everything is grotesque, the world of loud laughter and parti-coloured shoes. Years ago his vitelloni, restless provincials kicking stones about the road on an eternally empty afternoon, were dreaming of just such a world, a world of cities and pin-up beaches and film-stars, of outsize blondes and gossip columns, bright as an ice- lolly and about as subtle in flavour. the adult's equivalent, in wine-women-and-song. of the schoolboy's cream-puff. Fellini's films---and it makes for a good deal of their slightly gruesome interest—are, like no one else's, a single auto- biographical chronicle, a ragbag of his tastes and experience, a (sometimes painful) piece of self- portraiture.
We know he was one of his own vitelloni; we know 82 was a piece of public psychotherapy, a talking-aloud on a scale no one had ever quite attempted before; we know his wife is Giulietta Masina and he now makes a film about a woman called Giulietta in matrimonial troubles (we know they have matrimonial troubles); he even has an after ego in the shape of Mastroianni who played the hero of La Dolce Vita and the more admitted `self' in 8f. and is now followed by another actor (playing Giulietta's husband) who looks sinisterly like Mastroianni-ten-years-later. But it isn't the family resemblances and factual coincidences that put their mark on Fellini's films so much as the repetitive images and ideas, the narrow but obsessive range of interests, the brash whirligig that for him presents not just life but (the eye is still that of the dazzled outsider) Life. outsize and opulent, with knobs on and chocolate sauce, a world outside which (it is clear from his view of outsiders) nothing really exists.
The heroine of Juliet of the Spirits (1 can't, as the Academy does, call her Juliet, as it sounds and looks a completely different name) inhabits this world of Fellini's but doesn't quite belong to it. There, among moral and social spivs, she is made to feel inadequate; tiny. unsmart, middle- aged, childless, with two maids to keep her idle and an unfaithful husband she adores, she begins to see her problems and failures in terms of the past, which gradually obtrudes more and more —in the form of `ghosts'—till it almost takes over the present. In her despair at finding herself deceived, she is tempted by the devil, the world and the flesh in every disguise; by pseudo- religiosity, in the form of fashionable cults and spookiness; by despair in the form of suicide; even (which seems unlikely in her situation) by a couple of suitors, both of them serious and middle-aged. A sort of self-discovery, a pre- carious equilibrium, sends the ghosts packing in the end; yet the Fellini 'world'—that central absurdity, with the absurd husband at its centre —presumably remains.
Like all Fellini films, Juliet of the Spirits is far too long; even the eternally intriguing triangle of circus-brothel-convent (or showbiz-flesh- religion) has, after all, only three angles on the world and as a quizzing-glass tends to be repeti- tive. Fellini goes further than most in his fas- cinated exploration of the macabre, and in depict- ing physical, social, moral or metaphysical ghastliness has few equals. On the other hand he is so deeply involved in the ghastliness that we are invited to admire as well as gasp, to lap lit up as well as loathe it; yet all with a bounce -Snd jollity that make him ringmaster rather than moralist, cracking whips with a lot of noise but little real lashing. This is his first film in colour and he justifies its use splendidly: for the most twopence-coloured of directors, it seems logical to use what may be an extra dimension. Most of
Giulietta Messina
the time, suitably enough, his colour flares and screams; occasionally it darkens and glowers; in a few good moments it glitters with a pearly lustre. At all times (which I think is the test, in a colour film) it seems used as something more -than decoration, painted on as an afterthought. There is nothing weirdly memorable like Antonioni's pink beach or moonish landscapes in The Red Desert, but Fellini's isn't. after all, that sort of world: it is a gimcrack place in which neon glows almost rosily in the romanticism of an oddly innocent eye.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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