Word: giulietta
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...Juliet of the film's title is Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, exercising all of her rueful, clownish charm as a bourgeoise matron with marriage problems. Neither beautiful nor clever, and inhibited by an unshakable Catholic conscience, Giulietta is wounded by the discovery that her husband (Mario Pisu) has a mistress. She consults a seer, seeks refuge in spiritualism, tries to distract herself by befriending an elegant trollop (Sandra Milo) next door. Meanwhile, she begins to live more and more in fantasy - images of abstract evil, dreams of sexual abandon, phantoms of childhood fears. Not until...
...sacred and profane: whores, prophets, shrouded nuns, epicene cultists, damned maidens ablaze, sundry vile bodies and Freudian symbols on horseback. All are flamboyantly colorful creations. And a few of the film's conceits are breathtaking to behold, from the gauzy blue-grey magic of a sequence in which Giulietta's grandfather succumbs to a lady bareback rider to her neighbor's improbable Eden - an art-nouveau fleshpot in rainbow hues where sinners can slide a chute from bed to swimming pool or repair to a tree house devised for impromptu seductions...
Confusingly, Giulietta's perceptions grow so extravagantly heightened that they blur the line between reality and fantasy, and depolarization occurs. The rich, constantly bedazzling frieze of effects finally becomes an end in itself, resulting in a curiously empty drama. Instead of deepening the character of his heroine as he intends, Fellini overwhelms her, for the thousand-and-one-nights imagery he has flung pell-mell upon the screen seems organic only to his own turbulent imagination. Though Juliet of the Spirits offers bizarre and enticing spectacle, it is transparently a gaudy intellectual shell game that expends awesome amounts...
...tentative manner in which Beethoven composed, starting with ideas so trivial they look like a student's and rewriting virtually each bar a dozen times. Thayer's study of Beethoven's correspondence disproved not only the composer's supposed grand love affair with the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi but also alliances with many of the ladies with whom the sentimental 19th century liked to link his name. Factually, Thayer was rarely wrong (although he assumed the Beethoven family had come from Holland, whereas later research indicates it came from Belgium). Incredibly, a whole generation of biographers...
FALSTAFF (RCA Victor). With a princely cast that includes Geraint Evans, Giulietta Simionato, Mirella Freni and Rosalind Elias, Verdi's masterwork is sung better than ever before on records. But Conductor Georg Solti does not live up to the Falstaff achieved by Arturo Toscanini in his famous 1950 recording. His beat is too rigid to be helpful to his singers...