City of Women (1981)

Really Surprised!

As Good As It Gets

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

A super-delicious film, with a super nice Marcello Mastroianni. Maybe because is made by a guy named Federico Fellini? Anyone heard of him and his movies? I write this here now because, living in London, United Kingdom, from 2007, I asked many people, especially people in the film business, actors, actresses, directors, etc., no one has heard of him and did not see not even one movie by him. Sad but true, very sad! Back to the review and without telling the subject of the film, like others... There are many, many women in this film, almost all feminist militants, all the actresses, most of them absolutely unknown, doing an excellent job, especially Alessandra Panelli as The Housewife and Jole Silvani as The Motorcyclist. Fellini had all the qualities to make films: great storyteller, writer, director, producer. A special quality was to find the actors, often unknown or nonprofessional(check the cast and you will see). In the starring roles, he distributes the English Bernice Stegers and the Polish Anna Prucnal, both of them very good, one better than the other. Actually, Anna Prucnal, as Elena, Mastroianni-Snàporaz's wife, is absolutely fantastic. Back to Mastroianni, his character, Snàporaz, is very close to Marcello Rubini from "La Dolce Vita" and Guido Anselmi from "8½", ie, the alter ego of Fellini. With the line "Veramente la cinquanta, ma la voglia sempre tanta!" ("I'm truly in the fifties, but the desire is always so much!"), he says it all, this is the message of the film! And, we all know, what kind of desire he's talking about. Great music by Luis Bacalov, great song by Gino Soccio ("The Visitors") used in a very expressive scene, great great cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. Also the editor, Ruggero Mastroianni, did a great job. Brilliant! To be seen again and again and again, to be understood and appreciated at its true value.

The idea for this film is amusing. A man is dreaming or in a dream-like world run by angry ultra-ultra-ultra feminists who naturally scare him BUT at the same time, he tries to infiltrate their ranks because he is strongly aroused by one of these women--a lady he met and ALMOST had sex with on a train. Again and again, he tries in vain to find her but must contend with angry women who spout dogma like it's an indoctrination camp. This, combined with the obvious Freudian phallic imagery is used to create a man's worst nightmare--women who don't want him and who laugh at his virility! It's all an Absurdist-Surrealist experiment that just doesn't hold up for long--especially because the movie seems to last an eternity. As a result, the original momentum is lost and odd but not especially interesting characters are introduced (such as the stud who is about to have his 10,000th conquest). About the only thing I DID like about the latter portion of the film was the nightmarish amusement park atmosphere towards the end--seeing Marcello Mastroianni sliding down a seemingly endless slide as he passed midway events was pretty amazing from a technical point of view.Overall, it's a one joke film that probably would have been better as a short. I know that the "Fellini-heads" out there think everything he did was pure genius, but this one just left me cold after a while. Perhaps I am just a plebe, but this and his other mondo-bizarro films like SATYRICON are bizarre and overdone.

Although I was born in Italy, I never had the chance to see a movie by Fellini.Yesterday I decided to fill this gap, watching "La citta' delle donne".I was very disappointed, not only by the movie, but also by the commentaries included in the DVD (American edition).*** Some spoilers from now on *** The movie is a total mess. Everything is loud and exaggerated. There are no hints or subtleties. The message the movie aims at conveying, the difficulty of men to deal with women in the modern era with the men losing their predominant position, is screamed. For 20 minutes you can cope with such a visual and acoustic disorder, but I found 140 minutes definitely too much to bear.I did not find the movie funny either. For example, one of the character's name is Katzone (an Italian vulgar expression for big penis) and guess what? He is a womanizer, he lives in a house full of phallic shaped objects, he has taped the moaning of all women he has slept with, and so on and so forth. Maybe, you can laugh for one second about it, but everything is so obvious, trivial and vulgar that I found it very hard to appreciate.Mastroianni delivers a great performance, as usual. The problem does not lie in the actors, (actually most of them deliver great interpretations) but in the director's vision of the movie.The film does not flow. The sequences are not linked appropriately and sometimes are way too long: he could have obtained the very same result (shocking/amusing the audience) in half the time.Being the movie a dream by a man in his 50's, it is reasonable to express it in such a disorganized and convulsive way. However, I do not need to see a movie to get that feeling, my own dreams are enough.Fellini was very brave to propose such a theme, especially in a very rigid society as the Italian one. He wanted to be provocative and he succeeded in that dimension. However, he failed at making the audience think about those issues, being only worried at representing his own insecurities and fears.I also found the movie very arrogant, in the sense that it made me think that Fellini wanted the audience to believe that they were watching not only a movie but "art".Frankly speaking, this film is so bad that it makes any Tinto Brass production look like a masterpiece.In the DVD's commentary the people asked to comment on Fellini's work basically said that he was a genius. I think they do not understand what a genius is. Moreover, all the people interviewed do not explain or motivate why they think he was such a great artist.He might have had a different approach to things, he might have had a personal interpretation of facts, he might have broken the clichés of his time, but defining him a genius is way too much, at least for what he has done with this movie.I think that labeling him as a genius does not allow him to be pretentious and his movie to be pointless.I still hope that "8 1/2" is going to change my mind about Fellini's work.

A number of fascinating sequences and a few interesting ideas keep this film afloat when the other element do not work out. The film makes it quite clear within the first hour that what we are witnessing is a dream, and the sets, costumes and hues all reflect a dreamlike state very well. But, we know little of our protagonist before he falls asleep, nor do we see much that he has done, and therefore it becomes all rather meaningless - just a collection of thoughts, rather than anything relating to the "real world". Still, it is certainly quite interesting to watch, as one never knows just what will happen next. The film has a very intriguing screenplay, if not much else, and Marcello Mastroianni is rather good, if not great, in the lead. It is not a brilliant piece of work, especially coming from such a highly praised director, but it is an interesting film, with a gripping dreamlike quality.