We’re back, several months after 8 1/2 (sorry!), with a film that I find frustrating and confounding – and yet I’m difficult to shake it off: Juliet of the Spirits. Two years after Fellini’s last film, and after two movies in which Marcello Mastroianni played variants (albeit more overtly attractive ones) of the director himself, Fellini cast his wife Giulietta Massina, for the first time in eight years (he’d last directed her in Nights of Cabiria) – and, in a twist on what he’d done with Mastroianni, Masina plays a character not dissimilar from herself: Giulietta Boldrini is an upper-class housewife, married to a philandering, self-centred husband, and while the details are vague but specific enough to show that the Boldrinis aren’t literally Fellini and Masina, the constellation of their marriage isn’t a hundred miles from that of the famous film-making couple.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 