"Juliet of the Spirits" may be 'minor' Fellini, the first of his films to feel like an indulgence more than anything else and also his first film in colour; of course, it looks gorgeous. You might call it a 'divertissement' and it moved further away from the realism of anything he had done previously and, of course, it's yet another love letter to his wife, Giulietta Masina.
She's the Juliet of the title, a bourgeoisie housewife whose fantasies, mostly revolving around her husband's potential infidelity, make up most of the film's running time. It's as if Fellini were taking those fantastical elements of his previous couple of films, serving them up as a beautifully over-the-top extravaganza and in glorious colour. In its way it's quite as radical as "8 1/2" if not in the same class, (there is no real depth to it, everything is on the surface), but you certainly couldn't mistake it for the work of anyone else and maybe that is praise enough.
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