IMDb RATING
7.6/10
13K
YOUR RATING
Visions, memories, and mysticism all help a 40-something woman to find the strength to leave her cheating husband.Visions, memories, and mysticism all help a 40-something woman to find the strength to leave her cheating husband.Visions, memories, and mysticism all help a 40-something woman to find the strength to leave her cheating husband.
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
13K
YOUR RATING
- Director
- Writers
- Federico Fellini(story)
- Tullio Pinelli(story)
- Ennio Flaiano(screenplay)
- Stars
Top credits
- Director
- Writers
- Federico Fellini(story)
- Tullio Pinelli(story)
- Ennio Flaiano(screenplay)
- Stars
- Nominated for 2 Oscars
- 11 wins & 5 nominations total
Videos1
José Luis de Vilallonga
- Giorgio's friendas Giorgio's friend
- (as José De Villalonga)
Friedrich von Ledebur
- Headmasteras Headmaster
- (as Fredrich Ledebur)
Milena Vukotic
- Elisabetta, the maidas Elisabetta, the maid
- (as Milena Vucotic)
- …
George Ardisson
- Dolores' modelas Dolores' model
- (as Giorgio Ardisson)
- Director
- Writers
- Federico Fellini(story) (screenplay)
- Tullio Pinelli(story) (screenplay)
- Ennio Flaiano(screenplay)
- All cast & crew
- See more cast details at IMDbPro
Storyline
Juliet lives in a beautiful house by the ocean. Her sisters, and especially her Mother overshadow her with their beauty. She is a spiritual, superstitious and naive woman. She visits a psychic seer who tells her she must follow the sex trade in order to be happy. Not long after she meets her eccentric and sexy neighbour, Suzy, who, by all counts appears to be a high class prostitute and encourages Juilet into sexual acts which make her guilty and nervous. A rare night when her husband is at home she wakes up to catch him talking to another woman on the phone. He calls out the name "Gabriella" while sleeping, but when she questions him he lies his way out of it. She finds out who Gabriella is and fears her husband will leave her. Juliet begins having visions who accuse and terrorize her. The pinnacle of the visions comes at the end where it is implied she realizes she would be better off without her husband and is ultimately emotionally emancipated. —kwedgwood@hotmail.com
- Taglines
- Fellini's Masterpiece !
- Genres
- Certificate
- Not Rated
- Parents guide
Did you know
- TriviaDirector Federico Fellini claimed he took LSD in preparation for making this film.
- Quotes
Giulietta Boldrini: I don't care about the clemency you offer me but the salvation of my soul.
Top review
Nine; or, Fellini's Other Half
"Juliet of the Spirits" is one way, I suppose, to make a dissatisfied bourgeois housewife's life look intriguing--a colorized "8 1/2" (1963) for writer-director Federico Fellini's actress-wife, Giulietta Masina. Most of this one involves her concern over her husband's philandering, but there's also her childhood memory--apparently, a traumatic event of some sort--of playing the central role of the martyr in a Catholic-school play. Plus, there's the circus of fashion and sex in the world of modeling and other carnivalesque endeavors that seems to surround her through her husband's work and that of her other family members, friends and neighbors. Much of this bombards her as surreal visual and audible hallucinations. I don't care to get into the Freudian or Jungian analysis of her problems, though. That nonsense is quite dull--like a lazy housewife dozing off while sunbathing on a beach. Kudos to Fellini, though, for making it look a sumptuous spectacle.
Instead of the director double standing in for Fellini in "8 1/2," who faces a creative crisis, the housewife here traces her marital trap back to the stage of her religious performance. Eventually, the promise of her salvation involves rescuing that childhood memory. This also seems to be the key, slight as it may be, to suggestions that "Juliet of the Spirits" alludes to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. I've been seeking a bunch of films inspired by that children's literature since reading them, and I came to this after reviewing Woody Allen's "Alice" (1990), which is said to be a reworking of this Fellini film, which also seems to be a slight connection to me having now viewed both, but I digress. If there is some of Carroll's Alice in Fellini's Giulietta, it's in their shared repressed childhood. Of course, the Alice books predate Freud and Surrealism and are nonsense rather than analytical, but they likewise parody their protagonist's outer reality within the dreamworld. That includes nursery rhymes and other prior children's literature. Likewise, "Juliet of the Spirits" ends up parodying film by turning it into a mode for surveillance of the husband's dalliances, or as a source of mockery via television.
Besides, akin to Wonderland, taking place along beaches, gardens and forests, note, too, how this film begins and ends visually. Within the first scene, there is a virtuoso shot through a series of looking glasses--announcing a mirror motif that continues to some extent throughout the picture. And, the ending includes the opening of a small door, so that Giulietta may finally enter the tunnel she's heretofore repeatedly shunned--especially as offered by her Caterpillar of a neighbor, who sports a butterfly tattoo (not as explicit as the White Rabbit ink in "The Matrix" (1990), but still...) and tries to show Giulietta who she may become. Although, with all the ridiculous head gear here, there really ought to be a Mad Hatter about; after all, it was a cat, like the Cheshire one with Alice, that led Giulietta to her neighbor's mad Champagne party (hey, they're Italian--not English). Moreover, the neighbor guides her quite vividly, what with the sex mirror on the ceiling, all of the deflowering going about alongside her flower-covered staircase, and the vaginal-like openings, through a pool slide and a hole to a platform in the trees (where, presumably, more sex is to occur). It's this Wonderland nonsense that's lustrous.
Instead of the director double standing in for Fellini in "8 1/2," who faces a creative crisis, the housewife here traces her marital trap back to the stage of her religious performance. Eventually, the promise of her salvation involves rescuing that childhood memory. This also seems to be the key, slight as it may be, to suggestions that "Juliet of the Spirits" alludes to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. I've been seeking a bunch of films inspired by that children's literature since reading them, and I came to this after reviewing Woody Allen's "Alice" (1990), which is said to be a reworking of this Fellini film, which also seems to be a slight connection to me having now viewed both, but I digress. If there is some of Carroll's Alice in Fellini's Giulietta, it's in their shared repressed childhood. Of course, the Alice books predate Freud and Surrealism and are nonsense rather than analytical, but they likewise parody their protagonist's outer reality within the dreamworld. That includes nursery rhymes and other prior children's literature. Likewise, "Juliet of the Spirits" ends up parodying film by turning it into a mode for surveillance of the husband's dalliances, or as a source of mockery via television.
Besides, akin to Wonderland, taking place along beaches, gardens and forests, note, too, how this film begins and ends visually. Within the first scene, there is a virtuoso shot through a series of looking glasses--announcing a mirror motif that continues to some extent throughout the picture. And, the ending includes the opening of a small door, so that Giulietta may finally enter the tunnel she's heretofore repeatedly shunned--especially as offered by her Caterpillar of a neighbor, who sports a butterfly tattoo (not as explicit as the White Rabbit ink in "The Matrix" (1990), but still...) and tries to show Giulietta who she may become. Although, with all the ridiculous head gear here, there really ought to be a Mad Hatter about; after all, it was a cat, like the Cheshire one with Alice, that led Giulietta to her neighbor's mad Champagne party (hey, they're Italian--not English). Moreover, the neighbor guides her quite vividly, what with the sex mirror on the ceiling, all of the deflowering going about alongside her flower-covered staircase, and the vaginal-like openings, through a pool slide and a hole to a platform in the trees (where, presumably, more sex is to occur). It's this Wonderland nonsense that's lustrous.
helpful•20
- Cineanalyst
- Aug 20, 2020
Details
Box office
- Gross worldwide
- $8,734
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By what name was Giulietta degli spiriti (1965) officially released in India in English?
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