SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

elvircorhodzic JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is a fantasy comedy drama film which is designed as a very fun psychoanalytic game. However, this film deals with serious topics, such as fraud in marriage and sexual crisis in middle age. Mr. Fellini has brought a surreal-fantastic view of the bourgeoisie, through a fairy-tale face of a middle-aged woman.Giulietta is a wealthy housewife who constantly fears her husband is cheating on her. She yearns for the quiet intimacy with her husband. However, their eccentric friends are common in their house. To find inner peace, she goes to a psychological session. She begins to explore her subconscious and the odd lifestyle of her sexy neighbor, Suzy, as she attempts to deal with her mundane life. It appears that all of Giulietta's family, friends, and fantasies demand that she loosen up and embrace sexual freedom, yet she remains chaste and dowdy, lamenting over her unfaithful husband...I have to admit that it was difficult to cope with this challenge, which is composed by fantasy and dreams, but its final product is more than clear. Psychological problems of the main protagonist, which, among other things, consist of repressed experiences, are very complex, but not unpleasant. Mr. Fellini did not try to give an answer to her obvious problem. He tries to faithfully convey a painful experience of her youth, which directly influences her decisions in the present.The characterization is not as good as in Fellini's previous films. Mr. Rota has offered a pleasant musical background.Giulietta Masina as Giulietta Boldrini is very good in the role of a confused, deceived and lonely wife. She is one of my favorite face on screen. The whole cast performs delightfully, particularly Sandra Milo (Suzy / Iris / Fanny), a sweet courtesan and Giulietta's guide to sexual freedom.

Phillim Trippy, Freudian comedy of manners. Fellini's first feature-length film in color. Reportedly told art director Piero Gherardi to avoid hues and materials appearing in nature. Fabulous lush cartoon-y result -- the movie is a work of intensely beautiful design. Nino Rota's music is 'swinging '60s' festive and creepy.Giuletta Masina (Mrs. Fellini) plays a neglected bourgeois wife whiling away her days in a chic seaside villa, ordering the pitying maids around and trying on tasteful outfits and wigs. She suspects her slick husband is cheating. Her glamorous mother bullies her for not working to be more sexually attractive, while her impossibly beautiful sister flutters about. The archetypal whore in the mansion next door (the glorious Sandra Milo) appears to be willing to share her life-as-continuous-kinky-sex-fantasy. A gallery of comic grotesques wander through: the clown-astrologer, the hermaphrodite mystic and smug entourage, the butch lady mod psychotherapist, the goofy-sinister private detectives -- and that impossibly handsome older man from 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (José Luis de Vilallonga) -- and all offer, with absolute certainty, sketchy-to-confusing advice.Meanwhile, Juliet entertains visions and paranormal visitations with increasing frequency. She time travels to extended cracked-memory versions of her whacky Catholic girlhood. Shame and desire for liberation continually collide. Maintaining the respectable facade becomes increasingly difficult.Masina's fine performance is both hilarious and heartbreaking -- and smartly unsentimental -- her theatrical comic skills beautifully channeled as the matron with internal and external worlds sliding toward the edge with increasing velocity. Masina's work as 'Juliet' is mature artistry -- not as lauded as in husband Fellini's earlier neo-realism classics 'Nights of Cabiria' or 'La Strada' -- but no-less accomplished.The ambiguous comic-terrifying tone maintains through the closing credits: did we just witness a happy ending or a tragedy? I felt this when I saw the film as a kid fifty years ago -- felt the same on seeing it recently.

GertrudeStern There's that moment when you're very exhausted before sleep, maybe you're intoxicated or just overworked and underloved. Vivid images surface in the mind's eye. That's Juliet of the Spirits. Fellini touches the senses with both hands -- playing with light and color, things appear unexpectedly, and right when you expect them, they vanish. Everything moves quickly, with opulence.The eponymous Juliet lives a comfortable financial life, but that's about all that's comfortable. Her mom is a certified ice queen and her dad is a nut. Women around her are always losing weight at the behest of "directors", she has a blonde neighbor who oozes sex and all Juliet wants is to get the glow back in her eyes. Her husband, though good-natured enough, is busy and distracted, and worse, he says the name of another woman while sleeping -- the haunting syllables, "Gabriella".Then, Bishma, a clairvoyant, rolls into town. Juliet is summoned to Bishma alone with the question of her husband's fidelity. I had high hopes for the Bishma, but they turned out to be kind of a sub-par prophet, telling Juliet that she needs to please her husband better and suggesting a pair of black fishnets. Juliet holds her own until she loses it and starts having visions of pulse-quickening women in ceiling swings and atop horses. She does get a heartening omen upon her final exit from Bishma's pad: "a good and beautiful change will come tonight".Turns out Bishma is not the false prophet one might have thought. A handsome stranger shows up in Juliet's garden and prepares an elixir -- sangria -- which the Bishma name dropped in their final word. Juliet finds a cat with a bow around it's neck. She adopts some artistic, spiritual and sexual advisors who make her ride bikes through the rain. Her visions grow ever more powerful. She experiences things; she gets liberated.Juliet of the Spirits is a circus. You're in for tons of delightfully frilly headgear, impertinent canoodling, quoting of Lorca, private investigators, catholic-guilt-driven apparitions and magic telescopes. Very nice on the eyes.

Ovulus One of my friends saw this movie and derided it as just another quirky European message film. I offer the following interpretation to help people appreciate this wonderful story.In 1965, Italian director Federico Fellini directed his wife, Giulietta Masina, in an expressionistic soap opera about neurosis and the journey to healing. With her waif-like look of undying innocence, Masina was the perfect choice to represent the child in us all.In this film we see the world as Giulietta (Juliet) feels it: grotesquely distorted in lurid colors, peopled with posturing caricatures of human beings, and beset by hobgoblins from a past that refuses to die. Giulietta's friends are as neurotic as she is, only in different ways. Giulietta herself lives with a dull, constant, inner pain; yet her suffering can lead her out of psychic bondage should she ever summon the courage to face herself.As the picture opens, we discover that Giulietta's husband is heartlessly cheating on her with a younger woman. To avoid noticing, Giulietta dabbles in spiritualism. During a séance, in a rare moment of truth, Guglietta admits – or the spirits tell her – that she is leading a sham life, that no one loves her, that she is surrounded by false friends. The séance abruptly ends.Later, while sunning herself on a beach, she dozes off and dreams of a barge in the water just off shore. It is night, and people from Giulietta's decaying past crowd the barge, calling to her. Next we see her on the shoreline, trying to pull the barge after her by means of a long, thick rope. Then Giulietta wakes up. The film is full of these expressionistic touches.In another key scene, Giulietta consults a psychic – an elderly hermaphrodite. The psychic tries unsuccessfully to get Giulietta to face her repressed sexuality. Similarly, during a visit to the home of one of her escapist, pleasure-loving friends, Giulietta is paired with a real stud; but she cannot bring herself to enjoy sexual relations with him.Hobgoblin nuns in ominously hooded habits regularly haunt Giulietta's home – more ghosts from the past. They hearken back to a particularly painful episode in her childhood, when she appeared as a martyr in a religious pageant at a Catholic school. Only about seven years old, she was tied to a cross on the floor. Brightly colored crepe streamers simulating flames were taped to the cross, fluttering in the breeze from a nearby fan. Suddenly her grandfather bursts in upon the scene and angrily denounces the clergy for subjecting his grandchild to such cruelty. Untying her and taking her in his arms, he storms out of the room.At least someone in Giulietta's past cared about her. Certainly her frigid ice-maiden of a mother never did. We see the mother on a sunny day, colorfully dressed and looking like a surrealistic sherbet dessert.Finally her husband leaves her, depriving Giulietta of the last defense against her neurotic pain. Left alone in her large house, she is besieged by hooded demons everywhere she turns. Discovering a door without a handle, she tries in vain to pry it open. The voice of her mother booms, "Giulietta, do not touch that door!" With nothing more to lose, Giulietta suddenly stands tall and defiantly answers, "I no longer fear you!" The door opens by itself. Entering what looks like a ventilation duct, Giulietta discovers herself as a child, still tied to that awful flaming cross. In a deeply moving scene, she unties the child and hugs her, thereby effecting a true inner cure.Emerging from this secret chamber, Giulietta observes the hooded hobgoblins fading away. Then she walks outside into a peaceful rural setting, where everything once again looks natural.