Volume 5, Number 10 · December 23, 1965
La Dolce Spumoni
By Robert Brustein
Juliet of the Spirits
directed by Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini told an interviewer recently that he was trying to make his films approach the condition of poetry, but it is not the poet's art he employs in Juliet of the Spirits so much as the confectioner's. Fellini's latest work is a huge helping of Italian ice cream, covered with marshmallow topping, chocolate sprinkles, butterscotch sauce, and great gooey spirals of aerated whipped cream. It is a concoction clearly designed to be consumed: and after two-and-a-quarter hours of soda fountain specials—birthday-cake decor, appetizing costumes, spectacular memory-fantasies, technicolor spectra inspired by Vincente Minnelli, yellow wigs and crimson beards, dream caravans from the sea, seances, orgies, and succulent courtesans—one emerges from the theater as from a debauch, glutted and blearyeyed, yet with a curiously empty feeling in the stomach and a flat taste in the mouth.
Review, 1641 words
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