La cité des femmes

A few weeks ago, I posted a review of 8½, presently my undisputed Number 1 favourite movie. Still on the subject of Il Maestro, I've recently rewatched City of Women. This is another Fellini movie I'd watched many years ago, in my late teens, and didn't like at all back then. Well, I liked it (with reservations) this time. La città delle donne is one of the most robust, unrepressed and rough-around-the-edges explorations of the specifically Latin nature of machismo, feminism, gender rivalry and sexual politics I have ever seen. Many people don't like La città delle donne, but like 8½ and most Fellini movies of the later period it has an extraordinary, instinctive grasp of the rhythm and symbolic power of dreams. Its irritating aspect is coupled with and impossible to separate from the grasp it has upon the potency of what our psyche hides in among its hidden, ancestral folds - in this case, Marcello Mastroianni's character's but also our very own. This movie worms its way into your own psyche in time - as with other Fellini movies, it seems to reveal scenes that are totally new and surprising, yet strangely familiar to me even though I've never seen them before. As if I'd always been familiar with them, perhaps from a previous life - Fellini seems able to tap into a universal psychic blueprint of the soul, I think that's what it is - only a true Genius could do something like this. He gets to the emotional core of human experience, which means that even though I was never a young man who went to a brothel in 1930s Italy, as he has, there is something of the experience that I can relate to, as if it were universal. I guess the fact that things are rarely LITERALLY represented in his later movies (post-La Dolce Vita), also contributes towards this, making everything more symbolic and hence, universal.

But Città delle donne is also a shrill, over-the-top movie, grating in some ways, ridiculous, dated in others. Character-wise, Marcello is probably at his most repulsive... or perhaps I should say pathetic. But the movie, though flawed and a rehash of some other familiar Fellini themes treated more successfully elsewhere, is also delightful in parts, with a power in the use of visual symbols that I have rarely seen before, even in his own, more overall successful movies. For instance, the whole sequence in Dr Xavier Katzone's grotesque house, especially the mausoleum-like tunnel containing what is essentially the "essence" of his numerous past conquests, as well as the scenes of Marcello floating on the very originally-shaped "hot air balloon", Marcello being chased by the drugged-up teenage girl bullies in their squeaky old jalopies, etc - all scenes I won't be forgetting in a hurry.

If one really finds nothing to like in La città delle donne, it's ultimately still an important document on the gender battles that recent humanity has crossed. Perhaps Italy began these a decade or two later than, for instance, Northern European nations, but it got there eventually and in its own special, culturally individual way that can be compared to no other, since Italian men and women are not German or British or Swedish. Fellini pays tribute to that very Italian type of battle of the sexes here, stereotype-free but ever so evocatively. I have never delighted more in the never-obvious send-up of machismo as with this movie. This may be lost on non-Italian speakers but even the man's name, Katzone, is a phonetic rendering of the vulgar Italian word for... er... "big (male) genitals"! I give La città delle donne a 7½ out of 10 - I would have given it an 8 if it hadn't irritated me with its excesses in certain parts. Oh, what the hell - let's give it an 8/10!

It is not as much a study of eroticism as it is one man's erotic fantasy about the battle between the sexes…

A rich, horny Italian (Mastroianni) meets a woman on a train… When the train stops, he follows her into a lonely wood, which becomes a futuristic world of forceful women who have almost entirely destroyed completely all men in their society…

Mastroianni's character is left alive as a curiosity piece… His experiences carry him deeper and deeper into this bizarre fantasy city… The film never fully provides passion and erotic lusts, but is tickling and stimulating pleasantly none the less... Fellini's point—that women resent the fact that men are easily excited—is most effectively carried by Donatella Damiani, a buxom and very beautiful young actress who runs nearly naked throughout the movie…

Although the film never tires, it never quite completes its erotic expectations either, giving priority to consider carefully its own bizarre reality… It has elements of science fiction and adventure, but is more exactly a fantasy on the estrangement between men and women...

I'm not going to pretend that this is classic Fellini, or a masterpiece of Italian/European art-house cinema, but.....there's a lot going on in this movie that rewards a lengthy attention span. Mastroiani plays the archetypal middle-aged menopausal misogynist, the oldest swinger in town, calling women everything but women. Sows, mares, bitches, etc.

Fellini effortlessly sets him up for a long slow surreal fall from grace, deconstructing his fear of women in the process. It's a temporal culture clash, as stiff monochrome macho sexism meets technicolour badass feminism head on.

There's a few of Fellini's sublime production games going on in the background, most notably the orgasm orchestra that builds from the sono-portraits of Marcello's past lovers. The symbolism on display throughout is typically oblique, but it's effortlessly played for laughs in a way that few of his earlier films managed.

I've seen most of Fellini's output, from La Strada to Ginger and Fred, and for me this movie stands out along with those two as an accessible entry point into the satirical world view of one of Italy's most interesting directors.

It's certainly not a masterpiece, but it's definitely a wry look at the sexual mores of the day. And the cinematography ain't bad either.

I am a great fan of early Fellini, and as late as Amarcord I still find much to admire. After that, though, there seems to me to be an inexorable decline in originality. By the time we get to this film the decline is definitely in evidence throughout. Freshness has given way to trademark, vitality to predictability. Mastroianni is still there, as cool and enigmatic as ever, and some of the cinematography remains dazzling. But an air of staleness hangs over the whole film, which apart from its other defects is far too long. Fellini fanatics admire it, that much is obvious, and good luck to them. But most simple admirers will pass it by. It is worth adding that in the troubled and deeply unequal world we live in, Fellini's later obsession with the idle rich is looking increasingly frivolous. But maybe that's just me.

The opening shot of Fellini's "City of Women" is a train about to enter a tunnel, not exactly the subtlest shot to suggest a certain type of act, but in that case it works perfectly for two reasons: the POV is the train so we don't watch the phallic symbol but its 'target', plus the penetration into darkness foresees the trip into the hearts of darkness that awaits Guido, the film protagonist, played by an aged but still charming Marcello Mastroianni. That darkness is associated with women's liberation might divide opinions, but Fellini is not the man to say 'mea culpa'.

So the film opens in a train, Guido has a fling with a beautiful but rather severe-looking woman, he follows her to the bathroom, obviously not to talk about the latest dress fashion in Milan, the two conclude, the train stops, he follows her again, and finds himself in a feminist convention with the most incongruous set of female characters steaming off centuries of repressed anger and resentment against men and patriarchy, expressing in the most turbulent and truculent way their desire to build a more just society rid of phallocracy and ever archetypes that made Italy the Mecca of Latin seduction. And that's only for starters. If you're surprised by the aesthetics, then it's probably the first Fellini you ever saw, and then I'm afraid you didn't pick the right one.

Indeed, this is a film to satisfy the fans (mildly) and disconcert the newcomers, on the surface, like all Fellini movies, "Cities of Women" is a never-ending succession of disjointed vignettes forcing us to endure with enchantment, disgust, puzzlement and even embarrassment the shenanigans, not of a loony protagonist but of a gallery of female characters who cover the whole spectrum of women's attitudes, from the castrating to the nymphomaniac type, from the kitschy to the one who rhymes with it, from the frigid icy intellectual to the voluptuous matron. And in the content, I'm afraid the film doesn't provide more than a certain view of Fellini regarding the aggressiveness of feminism in the late 70s... and whether he sides with these women or looks at them with amused detachment isn't a matter of opinion, Fellini knows where he stands.

The film was made after his "Casanova", a critic against the Italian Don Juan who tries to pass as a sophisticated bourgeois in order to hide his crass obsessions. It's possible that Fellini had the same defiance against a certain hypocritical expression of feminism which, in the name of positive values: freedom, liberation, independence carried the same vulgar obsessions about sex. And in that cacophony of anti-men slogans, rapidly, a think-thank sessions turns into a heated debated where sexual positions and references to genitals are dropped, so it's not much Fellini criticizing the women that hate men, but the women whose hatred toward men cloud their judgment and bring the worst masculine traits in them.

In a way, every intellectual woman according to Fellini has her mind focused on her vagina or her relationships with men, seeing phallic symbols everywhere, and Guido embodies the point of view of men who, like Fellini, grew up with homely big-bosomed women incarnated by their mothers and aunts, came to age in the post-war era with sexually liberated women but then came the late 70s where religion and patriarchy stopped having a saying in everything. However, Guido doesn't handle the hostility with bad spirit but acts like a man visiting a curiosity, a zoo, and tries to understand with false benevolence what he believes to be a foreign language. To Fellini's defense, this misconception about feminism has hold up a long time until the 1990s... and to his defense again, the exaggeration wasn't that exaggerated.

To make a timely parallel, the film reminded me of Mr. Burns' visit at Yale ("The Simpsons"), Fellini at least had the guts to go against the stream and stick to his guns by expressing his nostalgia for the old-fashioned women, and he does so with the same flamboaynt bravura and extravagant flashiness that made his trademarks. And he does instrumentalize women like he did with his own wife Giuletta Masina in "Juliet of the Spirits", where she was given a rather ungrateful role in a movie that was also venturing in the fantasies of her husband, made of the same kind of attractive women, to whom she didn't belong. In "City of Women", women are all here, but for the biggest part of the film, they're not tantalizing him, "La Dolce Vita" had Anita Ekberg sensually inviting Marcello to "come here", this time, the invitation is reversed.

"O tempora! O mores" said the Romans, and Fellini takes us to a journey where women have seized the microphone. However, being the unapologetic macho he is, he proposes a second immersion in a universe where the roles are reversed again and that's where the film loses its pace. Guido visits the house of a man who had 10000 conquests and what follows is another "8½" fantasy ride, made of naughty games and an interesting trial that reminded me of "Pluto's Judgment Day". As to counterbalance his previous act, Fellini had to get back to another Casanova figure, without any sense whatsoever of restrain and measure, he's an artist so carried away by his instincts that he believes any idea that pops up in his mind deserves to be included.

Which makes the film like half an hour too long while it could have stuck to its initial idea and be a social fantasy-induced comment on feminism and a companion piece of "8½". "City of Women" has dazzling imagery, a wonderful set design, and reflects the powerful imagination of the director, what it lacks is just 'control' and a discipline. But it's still worth the watch as his last hurrah before the 80s, and seriously, it shouldn't offend much because the offensive parts are so cartoonish and over-the-top, they're no worse than a Benny Hill skit.