A Wife Betrayed

Juliet of the Spirits. Italy's Federico Fellini is the Barnum of the avantgarde. In his apocalyptic La Dolce Vita, as in the wildly self-centered 8$, his flair for baroque theatrical effects seemed to be a secondary characteristic of genius, the manner but not the meat of it. In Juliet, his first full-length movie in color, effect is everything. Fellini puts on a psychic three-ring circus that promises profundity and delivers only a stunningly decadent freak show.

The Juliet of the film's title is Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, exercising all of her rueful, clownish charm as a bourgeoise matron with marriage problems. Neither beautiful nor clever, and inhibited by an unshakable Catholic conscience, Giulietta is wounded by the discovery that her husband (Mario Pisu) has a mistress. She consults a seer, seeks refuge in spiritualism, tries to distract herself by befriending an elegant trollop (Sandra Milo) next door. Meanwhile, she begins to live more and more in fantasy -- images of abstract evil, dreams of sexual abandon, phantoms of childhood fears. Not until she at last loses her husband does Giulietta find herself and make peace, albeit rather arbitrarily, with her "spirits."

Through this frail plot, described as "a fairy tale for adults," Fellini parades a gallery of grotesques both sacred and profane: whores, prophets, shrouded nuns, epicene cultists, damned maidens ablaze, sundry vile bodies and Freudian symbols on horseback. All are flamboyantly colorful creations. And a few of the film's conceits are breathtaking to behold, from the gauzy blue-grey magic of a sequence in which Giulietta's grandfather succumbs to a lady bareback rider to her neighbor's improbable Eden -- an art-nouveau fleshpot in rainbow hues where sinners can slide a chute from bed to swimming pool or repair to a tree house devised for impromptu seductions.

Confusingly, Giulietta's perceptions grow so extravagantly heightened that they blur the line between reality and fantasy, and depolarization occurs. The rich, constantly bedazzling frieze of effects finally becomes an end in itself, resulting in a curiously empty drama. Instead of deepening the character of his heroine as he intends, Fellini overwhelms her, for the thousand-and-one-nights imagery he has flung pell-mell upon the screen seems organic only to his own turbulent imagination. Though Juliet of the Spirits offers bizarre and enticing spectacle, it is transparently a gaudy intellectual shell game that expends awesome amounts of energy to discover a pea.

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