Fellini's first full-length color film is like the female version of 8½ (1963) with hints of Alice in Wonderland in the margins. It approaches a condition of psychedelic poetry that never structurally comes together but instead takes a giant swan dive into a technicolor circus of dreams and fantasies. Visually, the film is quite stunning and fun to look at. You can tell Fellini is just indulging in the novelty of color prints and pushing it to maximum overkill, saturating each frame with some of the most intense hues and warm glows. He's like a kid in the candy store, drunk on his own excitement, playing with images and sounds that delight him, but lacking the control to probe them with any depth or lasting feeling. 

His unbridled brand of surrealism is enough to make you dizzy in the head, even though there are quiet moments of power and beauty that smile beneath the fog of stylistic abandon. 

The film waltzes you through a phantasmagorical landscape meant to mirror the marital breakdown its lead heroine is experiencing, but its free associative dream logic never quite moved me in the way that I was hoping. The riot of color, the weird characters, the jarring imagery —it's all fascinating and absorbing —but none of it feels tethered to any semblance of narrative despite trying to show that it is. 

Surrealism of course is the disintegration of law and order, but the level of excess and structural looseness on display here made me feel like Fellini didn't know what the hell he was doing. This is the same problem I had with LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and 8½ (1963). Fellini clearly has some great ideas he's trying to communicate, but he's often too disproportionately self-indulgent to get his point across in any real or meaningful way. 

I dunno. 

Maybe I'm too much of an intellectual to appreciate the fun he's clearly having. But even as a surrealist, whose previous two films I admire at a distance, he lacks the qualities I adore in other surrealists, like the mood of Lynch, the satire of Buñuel, or the quasi-spiritual insight of Jodorowsky. 

Maybe this will change as I continue to explore more of his work, but JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is a bit too reckless and curiously empty for my taste.

Fellini Ranked