It is said that the film master Fellini made his own "Juliet and the Devil" as a gift to his wife. Like many husbands, gifts to their wives are what they want.
The film, starring Julietta Masina, who worries about her husband's cheating, suggests that she would be happier if she were more like her neighbor, a busty vixen who pleases men on a treehouse.
Fellini believes the film is the opposite of his first two films, La Dolce Vitae and Eight and a Half—both autobiographical lamentations about his own predicament. Because he felt that the film was about Masina.
Looking at it reminds me of Zanuk's words: "But enough, stop talking about me!" What do you guys think of my movie? "Juliet and the Devil does not try to resonate with Masina's ideas, but rather shows Fellini's unabashed self-defense.
Juliet's fantasy is Fellini's fantasy. That is why, at the end of the film, it is not Fellini who is burned alive.
The cast is a key to unlocking the film's hidden message. Julietta Masina plays Juliet is an old smoking gun with neat short hair and plain and low-key clothing.
Sandra Minogue plays her neighbor Susie, who is dressed in a flashy and flamboyant outfit, a shawl made of feathers, and a deep V neckline that shows off her proud upper circumference.
In Fellini's "Eight and a Half Films," about a director who throws flowers and grass everywhere, his wife is also an old smoking gun with neat short hair - and the mistress played by Sandra Milo looks exactly like this one.
In "Eight and a Half Parts", the director has a self-dream, dreaming that his wife and mistress become friends and share his sorrow and hunger together.
In Juliet and the Devil, Fellini seems to hint that if his wife were more like this breast-fat stunner, she might be happier.
Our judgment is: She may not be happier, but her husband will.
The film in general is considered a sign of the beginning of a decline in Fellini's directorial skills. Some people think that his greatest era came from the 1950s, represented by the neorealist film "The Road".
He made an international splash with La Dolce Vita, in which the protagonist, Marcelo Mastroianni, played his first great role – a journalist trying to balance his work, marriage, mistress, daytime sexual fantasies, and ambiguous ideals.
I think this is Fellini's best film. Others might argue that it's "Eight and a Half Parts." The film tells the story of a director who tries to make a film despite his personal professional and health problems.
By the time Juliet and the Devil was made, the conventional wisdom was that Fellini was accustomed to naturally using his waltz-like camera to happily score with Nina Rota, repeating his bizarre human visions in parades.
Of his later films, the only one widely acclaimed was Amarcord.
Sometimes, however, it's only when an artist is immersed in his or her personal language that you can clearly see where his personal style lies. Juliet and the Devil, Fellini's first color film, is the work of a director who has broken with his earlier realist works.
The director plays with images, situations and obsessions that make him happy. It is well known that Fellini experienced a certain supernatural fixation when he first went to the circus to see a performance in his youth, and the most striking feature of his films is the parade and parade scenes.
If we say that the grotesque characters in Fellini's films walk around to the beat of the music, it may be a little too much.
He almost always designs scenes in the same way: characters rhythmically line up in the middle and long horizons, and then in the foreground, a face appears on the screen, eager to comment.
In Juliet and the Devil, the most enjoyable parade takes place on the beachside where the simple Zhu Zhaoye and her sisters and their children go, and she sees Susie walking in line on the beach with her friends, suitors, servants and followers, and Susie is dressed in bright yellow and hiding under a fancy umbrella.
They were on the beach, pitched a tent, and waved to her.
Later, when Juliet goes to her neighbor's house to return her lost cat, Susie shares her philosophy of life: for women, marriage means life imprisonment, Juliet should indulge in pleasure with the male playmate Susie brings, it is not worth the distress of her husband, and so on.
Susie's home has a slide that leads from her bed to a pool, and she has a treehouse with an electric lift that pulls her lover up in a wicker basket.
Susie's lifestyle may or may not be the answer Juliet wants, but her home certainly looks like a brothel Fellini wants to visit.
Juliet's process of self-liberation also includes a séance that is somehow realized (which is also a repetition of La Dolce Vita) and a fear of ritual punishment (the horrible nun in one scene resembles the stern priest in Eight and a Half Books, and both appear in the flashback of the protagonist's childhood).
The shots in Fellini's film are not obscure, in fact he returns to his early films, using those images to replace the male protagonist with the female protagonist.
Julietta Masina is a wonderful actress (check out her performances in The Road and Kabylia Nights), but does she seem somber for most of Juliet and the Devil? This is just my personal guess.
It is said that Masina and Fellini went through a difficult period in their marriage while filming the film. (Fellini's international reputation has transformed him from a hard-working Italian director into a big star who laughs at his new privilege with open arms.) ）
Of course, Fellini did not present her as a playful person worth marrying.
She is the embodiment of a middle-class cute who pays attention to home furnishings: meek and humble, silly and angry, and ashamed of sexual affairs. As Juliet passes through scene after scene, a fantasy of wives and concubines and a fragrant parade of breasts and fat buttocks, she looks like a reluctant housewife who has been dragged by her husband to a striptease show. And the latter thinks they all enjoy it.
This idea that Juliett/Juliet will turn worry into joy adds a sad tone to the film. She's the spectacle at this party.
What was she thinking when she made this film? Her husband first flaunts his taste for grotesque eroticism, and then expects his wife to star in a movie wrapped in these things?
The final shot of the film shows Juliet leaving her fairytale home and walking towards the nearby woods, where the director and his wife argue about the meaning of the scene.
For Fellini, that means she's free. For Julietta Masina, we know that it means she is alone and abandoned.
This kind of subordinate sound makes the film more interesting, and it would be less meaningful if Fellini were to control her thoughts and impulses to flee more.
And watching it is a dizzying experience. The movie is full of beautiful pictures. The music seems to be taking the camera for a ride.
In all of Fellini's films, especially La Dolce Vita, and beyond, the characters seem to dance to inaudible music.
In fact, they do. Like all Italian directors of his time, Fellini did not record simultaneous sound on set, but rather dialogue and sound effects in post.
This means that he is essentially shooting silent films, and he often arranges an orchestra or puts on a tape recorder on set, plays music, and guides his actors to the rhythm of the music.
Nina Rota's soundtracks are often dance-like and often quote classic oldies. The result is such a movie, and sometimes, movies seem to be about to become musicals.
After filming "Juliet and the Devil", Fellini made "The Myth of Love", and now the images of both films have been skillfully restored and reissued.
We can see that he is a master of video. He was a storyteller early in his career, but later became a painter of the moving image, and those who cling to the plot or moral of his films are actually missing the point.
"Juliet and the Devil" was released in the United States in 1966, and undoubtedly, some audiences felt that it had expanded. They got it right: they said, it was a spiritual pleasure.
Watching it again in 2022, when the song ends with a dispersal, the film is like a streamer of a summer ball: still bright, still vivid, and forgotten melodies echo in the air for a long time.
Fellini has been nominated for twelve Oscars but won nothing. In 1993, he won the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, which his old friend Marcelo Mastroianni presented to him along with Sophia Roland.
As he held the little golden man in his hand, Julietta, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, cried with joy. He died in October of that year. She lived five months longer than him.