City of Women (Italian: La città delle donne) is a 1980 fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, who co-wrote it with Bernardino Zapponi and Brunello Rondi. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces towards a confrontation with his own attitudes towards women and his wife.
Contents
Plot
Snàporaz wakes up during a train ride and has a brief fling with a mysterious woman in the bathroom, but it is cut short when the train suddenly stops at Fregene and the woman gets off. Snàporaz follows her through a forest and into a hotel overrun with women in attendance for a surrealistic feminist convention. He winds up in a conference about polyandry, where his presence is rejected. A frightened Snàporaz retreats to the hotel lobby, but the exit is blocked; instead, he seeks refuge inside an elevator with a young woman, Donatella, who offers her assistance.
Donatella leads Snàporaz into a gymnasium and forces him to don roller skates. He is yet again cornered and berated by a group of angry women who circle around him in roller skates and practice testicle-kicking with a dummy. Dazed, Snàporaz makes his exit down a flight of stairs, falling down and hurting himself, and into the domain of a burly woman tending to the hotel's furnace. The woman offers him a ride to the train station on her motorcycle, but she stops by a farm and lures Snàporaz into a nursery, where she tries to rape him. They are interrupted by the woman's mother, who steps in to chastise her daughter. Snàporaz escapes and follows a lonely woman through the countryside. He joins her and her girlfriends in a car ride on the promise of being delivered to the station, but the ride goes on well into the night, the women smoking marijuana and listening to Italo disco. A frustrated Snàporaz ditches the women only to be harassed by others. He finally finds shelter at the mansion of Dr. Xavier Katzone, who shoots at his persecutors.
Dr. Katzone promises to deliver Snàporaz to the train station in the morning and invites him to stay for a party. Snàporaz walks around Katzone's extravagant home, which is filled with sexual imagery and phallic sculptures. He is also fascinated by a collection of photographs on the manor walls commemorating Katzone's sexual conquests; the photos light up and whisper arousing dialogue. Taking pride in his many inventions, Katzone celebrates his 10,000th conquest with an eccentric party that involves the blowing out of 10,000 candles and a performance by his wife, in which she sucks coins and pearls into her vagina by means of telekinesis. During the party, Snàporaz encounters his ex-wife, Elena, who has a drunken argument with him, and meets Donatella again.
The police (composed solely of women dressed in Nazi attire) arrive, interrupting Katzone mid-song and announcing the imminent demolition of his house. They also inform him that they have shot his most beloved dog, Italo, which a grieving Katzone buries. Meanwhile, Snàporaz dances to a song by Fred Astaire with a scantily clad Donatella and a friend of hers, but he fails to sleep with either of them, instead getting stuck in bed with his ex-wife. Hearing strange noises, he crawls under the bed, entering another dreamlike world in which he slides down a toboggan, revisiting his childhood crushes (including a sitter, a nurse, and a prostitute) along the way. Caged at the end of the slide, he is transported before a bizarre court and judged for his masculinity. Dismissed and set free, he climbs into a towering boxing ring before a female crowd. At the top of the ring, he boards a hot air balloon in the form of Donatella. Donatella herself fires at him from below with a machine gun, bursting the balloon and sending Snàporaz plummeting.
Snàporaz wakes up again on the very same train, with Elena across the way, indicating the entire story has been a mere nightmare. Just as he comes to this conclusion, he realizes his glasses are broken (as in his dream), before the mysterious woman and Donatella walk in and sit next to him. Elena and the mysterious woman exchange knowing smiles, and the train races into a tunnel.
Critical reception
Italy and France
City of Women opened in eighty Italian theaters in March 1980 and received generally favorable reviews bordering "on respect rather than praise". Corriere della Sera critic Giovanni Grazzini interpreted the film as "a catalogue of emotions, sometimes grotesque, sometimes farcical, which provides a few caustic jibes against the destruction of femininity by aggressive feminism... From a stylistic point of view, it's less homogeneous than usual but other parts of the film are delightful. For instance, when fantasy is used to create types of people rather than caricatures. In this sense Fellini, having abandoned his gallery of monsters, becomes more prosaic. Or when the ambiguity of certain characters - an excellent example is the soubrette played by the charming Donatella Damiani - provides a touch of grace and bitchiness; or when the film becomes almost a musical; or when paradox becomes surrealist, such as the party and the hurricane at the villa of Katzone who's in despair because his favourite dog has died".
"Fellini appears as the Madame Bovary of his adolescence", wrote Claudio G. Fava for Corriere Mercantile. "He revels in the enjoyment he feels at working with an experienced crew, side by side with faithful technicians who simulate trains on the move or the sea washing the shores of the inevitable Romagnol beaches as though they were working of the set of Georges Méliès. But then, again and again, Fellini has shown us that he is the greatest and most ingenious of Méliès's heirs. Only the magic does not always work, especially in the attempt to create a kind of astonished confession of amused impotence when faced with the new woman of today, together with a feeling of nostalgia for the old woman of the past... Despite Fellini's extraordinary virtuosity, the film rarely achieves harmony of inspiration, of order, of strip-cartoon fantasy, or of irony." Francesco Bolzoni of L'Avvenire insisted that Fellini was "only playing games. But then we would hardly expect from Fellini a deep analysis of the nature of women... It is a game with occasional gaps and, more often, inventions that rejuvenate an all too familiar, all too hackneyed subject. A surprising serenity predominates... It is a film with a tragic vein that in the end proves to be light-hearted and occasionally amusing". La Notte magazine's Giorgio Carbone felt the maestro had "finally reached a splendid maturity that permits him to lavish his treasures upon us for the simple pleasure of doing so. Behind the festival of images and colours we can feel his delight in making this film, a delight which, from the very first scene, becomes ours too, and it's something we haven't felt in a long time... If the film lacks suspense in its story (we care little what happens to Snàporaz or Katzone because we know that sooner or later Rimini and those bosomy extras will appear on the scene), there's suspense in the images and in the scenic inventions".
United Kingdom
Derek Malcolm of The Guardian said the film was "full of Fellinian stereotypes, even if they do mouth words at times that come straight from feminist mouths." Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "the once exciting Italian director, Federico Fellini, has long been in deep decline, at least to my taste; and his latest film City of Women,, shown at the Cannes Festival of 1980, is typical of his later work in that the illustration is often superb but the ideas infantile." Neil Sinyard of The Sunday Telegraph wrote that "rather than follow through hints about his fear of certain aspects of today's women and today's youth, Fellini eventually takes refuge in subjective reverie. Modernity is displaced 'by memory, and what promised to rise to incisive feminism has to make way for elegant frivolousness." Philip French of The Observer called it "an endless series of glittering, often vulgar, set-pieces at the service of a characteristic piece of confessional analysis that for all its theatrical flair remains a pretty childish exercise."
Australia
Susie Eisenhuth of The Sun-Herald wrote that "apart from the fact that feminists come in for a bit of a drubbing, the film, having dabbled with a more interesting approach to its subject, falls back on a series of predictable set pieces based on well-charted male fantasies." Neil Jillett of The Age wrote that "at 139 minutes 'City of Women' is far too long, and it never recaptures the exuberant silliness of the early scenes at the convention. But as a fantasy it is often beautiful and sets the imagination going, and as a confession it should give you a charitable fellow-feeling, a warm glow or superiority, or an occasional therapeutic flush of anger."
United States and Canada
Released by New Yorker Films in the United States on 8 April 1981, the film garnered generally favorable reviews but little box-office success. Daniel Talbot of New Yorker Films offered an explanation for the public's lack of interest: "Here, it played in less than fifty theatres, and of those, six provided 75 percent of the earnings. I don't know what Gaumont or Fellini could have expected with that kind of personal film. He had lost most of his audience here by then. Which isn't to say that I don't think him one of the great filmmakers of the world."
Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News said that "compared with Fellini's '8½,' 'City of Women' seems terribly flat and lifeless." Marke Andrews of The Sun in Vancouver wrote that "while City of Women is captivating, even dazzling at times, it is far too long for comfort. Several of the scenes, particularly those which take place at the playboy's party, drag on interminably." Jacqi Tully of The Arizona Daily Star wrote that the film "begins to drone once Snaporaz reaches Zuberkock's house. We've seen Fellini grapple with the male ego before, but he did it better in '8½,' and we've seen him go dreamy and surreal on us to the point of ridiculous self-absorption. The didacticism that was in 'Orchestra Rehearsal,' another recent Fellini movie that didn't work, is here, too. Message, message, find the message. The brilliant Fellini is the director who has looked into the past in fresh ways, as with 'I Vitelloni' and 'The Clowns,' and 'Amarcord,' who worked with what he knows best his homeland of Italy and the people there, as with 'La Strada,' and 'Roma' and 'Nights of Cabiria.' Fellini needs to have his hands in the earth, but in 'City of Women' his head is in the topical clouds. He's looking at feminism and the new woman, but making a movie on that subject isn't his strong suit. It's repetitive, used-up in spots. Fellini can overstate an image because he can do that magnificently, but he cannot overstate ideas. At that, he wilts."
Ed Blank of The Pittsburgh Press said the film was "like an extension of '8½', but bereft of inspiration and perilously close to self-parody." Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News called the film "hilariously awful, an incomprehensible pop-art bore. Above and beyond the fact that Fellini is rehashing his same old thoughts here and trying to foist them on us as some great vision of feminism, the film is also sloppily made and badly acted. Still, there's no doubt in my mind that this will be an art-house hit. Fellini has so successfully bamboozled pseudo-intellectuals in the past 10 years that many of them are convinced that a film's importance is directly related to its incoherence. I've a hunch that 'City of Women' will be mistaken for something serious and will be promptly overintellectualized. Instead, it should be simply dismissed as desperate filmmaking by a tired filmmaker. If I hadn't known beforehand that this was made by Fellini, I'd have taken it for a Fellini spoof from Andy Warhol's film factory. It plays like Fellini imitating Bob Fosse imitating Lina Wertmuller imitating Fellini."