“Venus in Furs” Tony-winner Nina Arianda, who recently won the coveted role of Janis Joplin in Sean Durkin’s biopic, has now been cast as the Italian actress Giulietta Masina in “Fellini Black and White,” reports Deadline.
As reported here in May, Henry Bromell’s film is a fictional account of Federico Fellini’s mysterious disappearance on his visit to Hollywood for the 1957 Oscar ceremony, for which he was nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category as the writer of “La Strada.” During Fellini’s absence in the movie, his long suffering wife Masina (“La Strada”’s naïve Gelsomina) has a dalliance with the actor and singer Ricky Nelson, then on the verge of pop stardom.
The Fellini-Masina marriage, plagued by the Maestro’s infidelities with actresses, dancers, and others, has long been the stuff of European movie lore. For all intents and purposes, Masina was played by Marion Cotillard (as the sympathetic Luisa) in “Nine,” Rob Marshall’s musical hommage to Fellini’s “8 ½” In the latter, the wife of Marcello Mastrianni’s philandering Guido (the Fellini figure) was played by Anouk Aimée as a woman colder and more chic than the frequently waif-like Masina.
Although the nature of Masina and Fellini’s dynamic was possibly more complex than anyone knows, there’s every sign that it was a codependency in which she played the role of masochistic enabler. Its most explicit expression on film is Fellini’s “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965, “Giulietta degli spiriti”), which explores the subconscious life of a sad, plain middle-class housewife, Giulietta, who suspects her husband, a successful public-relations man, is cheating on her. And she’s right.
Her man-eating neighbor Suzy, whose home is decked out like a brothel, was played by Sandra Milo, who also portrayed Guido’s sexy mistress in “8 ½.” Milo alleges in an interview included in the extras of the Criterion DVD of “8 ½” that she was Fellini’s mistress on and off for 17 years.
Fellini projects in "Juliette of the Spirits" that the chainsmoking Giulietta would have a better life if she were as sexually liberated as Suzy, but this, of course, is a rationalization to justify his own inconstancy.
There is a masochistic streak in Masina’s other great characterizations for her husband. In “La Strada,” the inspiration for Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” Gelsomina is brutally treated by the strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) and wastes away after he abandons her.
In “Nights of Cabiria,” she plays the eponymous prostitute who twice falls in love with men who only want her for her earnings and are prepared to kill her to get them. One wonders what this intrepid actress thought, deep down, of the roles her husband cast her in – or if they did, indeed, answer to some unspoken need of her own. Masina died of lung cancer in March 1994, five months after Fellini.
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