Fellini’s first film in colour surrounds Giulietta Masina with hats, mediums and a sensualist next door, and much of it is a pleasure to look at. It also runs 148 minutes, and a good forty of them are the director admiring his own party.
Federico Fellini’s first film in colour, two years after 8½, moves the camera from a film director who cannot finish his film to a wife who cannot finish a thought without a ghost interrupting. Giulietta Masina plays Giulietta Boldrini, a wife in a white villa by the sea whose husband Giorgio (Mario Pisu) forgets their anniversary and says another woman’s name in his sleep. That is the plot, and the film hangs 148 minutes of visions on it. Some of those minutes are the loveliest Fellini ever shot; a good many more are the director wandering round his own party admiring the hats.
Gianni Di Venanzo shoots the villa in whites and pale greens, the beach in hard noon light, and Suzy’s house over the wall in reds so deep the walls look wet. Piero Gherardi, who did the costumes and the sets, puts the guests in hats the size of bicycle wheels and Giulietta in the plainest thing in every room, a straw sun hat among the feathers. The visions on the beach arrive on a raft in broad daylight, with no change of lens or light to warn us they are not real. Fellini never marks the border between what Giulietta sees and what is there, and it is the best decision in the film.
Masina is the reason to sit through it. She had played the holy fool in La Strada (1954) and the streetwalker in Nights of Cabiria (1957), and here she is asked to be the quiet one in a frame full of noise. She takes in Giorgio’s friends, her sister Adele (Luisa Della Noce) and her mother (Caterina Boratto), who is more beautiful than she is and lets her know it, and she gives back a smile that arrives half a second late. Early on she hears the name in the dark and lies still, and we were more moved by that than by anything the spirits say afterwards. It is a small hurt, played small, and the film around it is enormous.
Sandra Milo, in three roles, is the other engine. As Suzy, the woman in the red villa, she keeps a house built for pleasure, and she offers Giulietta a freedom that comes down to better underwear and more visitors. Milo plays her without a trace of malice, which is right; Suzy is not the villain, she is the brochure. Valeska Gert’s Pijma, croaking advice from a hotel bed, and Friedrich von Ledebur’s medium complete a gallery of people glad to tell Giulietta how to live.
The trouble is length and point of view. Four writers, Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi, give Giulietta a marriage, a mother, a childhood, a guru and a neighbour, and the film visits each of them twice. Ruggero Mastroianni cuts memory into the present without a seam, and that also means the second hour has no shape beyond the next arrival. In the second hour, during another procession through Suzy’s rooms, we found we had stopped watching Giulietta and were counting the furniture, which is the wrong thing to be doing in a film about her. Nino Rota’s score is fairground music, organ and brass, right for the parties and wrong for the bedroom, where it keeps playing.
And this is a husband’s picture of a wife’s insides. Fellini was married to Masina, and the film is generous to her, and it still cannot imagine her wanting anything that is not a man, a memory or a dress. 8½ got away with the same drifting because Guido’s job was to drift. Giulietta has nothing to do, and the film never decides what it wants for her.
See it big if you can, because the colour is the point and a small screen turns Gherardi’s reds to brown. Give it a whole evening rather than a late slot; it runs 148 minutes and hurries for nobody. Keep your eye on Masina rather than the party; she is doing something quieter and better in the corner.
