Juliet of the Spirits

Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Federico Fellini's first feature in colour, is in some ways a female companion piece to 8½: it swaps that film's blocked director for a repressed housewife and her inner life. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and is among the most visually extravagant things Fellini ever made.

Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and the soul of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, plays Giulietta, whose suspicion that her husband is having an affair unleashes a flood of hallucinations, childhood memories and grotesque apparitions. Working with the designer Piero Gherardi, Fellini fills the screen with riotous colour, fantastical costumes and a carnival of spirits, and blurs reality and reverie until the distinction stops mattering. The whole film is conceived as the landscape of one woman's mind.

Critical opinion was divided, and some found it overstuffed where 8½ had been controlled. But its imagery has proved indelible, and its dreamlike treatment of a woman's inner emancipation has won fresh admirers over time. Anyone who wants to understand Masina's expressive gifts, or Fellini's first plunge into colour, needs to see it. Lavish, strange and generous, Juliet of the Spirits is the maestro turning his fantastical eye inward on behalf of his greatest muse, and restored to its full chromatic splendour it now looks like one of his boldest experiments, with the incomparable Masina at its centre.