AT COCHIN MEDIA SCHOOL,
NEAR SOUTH OVER BRIDGE,
SAHODARAN AYYAPPAN ROAD,
ERNAKULAM, COCHIN-36.
La Citta Delle Donne (1980)
'CITY OF WOMEN'
DIRECTED BY :FEDERICO FELLINI
A SPECTACLE BY FELLINI
REVIEW By VINCENT CANBY
http://movies.nytimes.com/
BECAUSE ''City of Women,'' Federico Fellini's gigantic new motionpicture spectacle, is so closely connected in one way and another to all of the 17 Fellini films that precede it, and because it is as much a culmination as a continuation, it's impossible to look at this latest work with the objectivity you might bring to a film by any other major director you can name.
Objectivity is not only impossible, it's also a waste of time. Mr. Fellini's gifts, like those of Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose name is dropped more than once in ''City of Women,'' are so entangled with his self-absorbed excesses that to attempt to criticize him with coherence, or even with solemnity, is to play the game he is playing on himself in this very long but witty and phenomenal film.
''City of Women,'' is a direct descendant of ''La Dolce Vita'' (1960), ''8 1/2'' (1963) and ''Juliet of the Spirits'' (1966). However, because its hero, a fellow named Snaporaz, played by the remarkable Marcello Mastroianni in the top of his Fellini form, most vividly recalls Guido in ''8 1/2,'' the new film could easily have been titled ''18.'' ''City of Women'' is Mr. Fellini's 18th feature, if one follows his own practice of counting every two of his short films as a single full-length film.
Snaporaz is Guido nearly 20 years older, not much wiser but more curious than ever and far more rueful than the film director he was supposed to be in ''8 1/2.'' Indeed, we never do learn what Snaporaz does for a living in ''City of Women,'' which has the form of an extended dream in which Snaporaz considers his lifelong search for the ideal woman, a creature who, when found, is presented as a question: Is she a reward or a punishment?
The fantastic journey begins on a train where the dozy Snaporaz become attracted to a big, beautiful, apparently available woman who sits in the compartment across from him. She wears a chic fur hat and a suit so carefully and efficiently tailored that it should send out warning signals to the aroused Snaporaz. But no. Instead of taking his time or making any pretense at courtship, Snaporaz pursues the woman to the washroom and gets straight to the point, only to be interrupted by the train's arrival at the woman's station. When Snaporaz heedlessly follows her off the train, he finds himself walking across a grassy field, panting for breath as he tries to keep up with her long strides, heading into a forest of Arden as only Mr. Fellini could imagine it.
Within the forest Snaporaz comes upon a magnificent hotel, the headquarters for a convention of furious feminists of every age, size, color, disposition, shape and degree of commitment. There are beauties and hags, reformed housewives, militant lesbians, and one particular celebrity named Mrs. Small, a tiny, birdlike creature who has found happiness in polygamous marriage to six docile husbands, each of a different nationality and each grateful when he is treated gently, or even recognized, by his mistress.
Snaporaz is ignored, ridiculed, tolerated, threatened, frightened, flirted with and, eventually, abducted by a muscular, motor bikeriding farm woman who agrees to drive Snaporaz back to his station but, instead, attempts to rape him in a lonely peapatch. Poor Snaporaz's virtue is saved by the opportune appearance of his rapist's mother, a country crone who is as ignorant of feminism as she is ancient. Humbly she apologizes for her daughter's bad manners. Imagine trying to rape such a nicely dressed gentleman!
In his succeeding adventures Snaporaz is taken prisoner by a car full of joyriding, pot-smoking teen-agers, nymphet gargoyles who are more interested in raising hell in general than in doing anything with him in particular. It's as if they'd already passed beyond sex into a world where boredom is the last pure pleasure.
There's also an extended sequence in a great, ornate country house, built to resemble an ancient Roman temple, presided over by the last of the legendary male chauvinists, an aging red-haired satyr named Dr. Xavier Zuberkock who, on this particular night, is celebrating his 10,000th female conquest as well as, he must admit, his last. Having used women all his life, and having fought the good fight against the local female police force, which has declared his temple illegal, Xavier sadly acknowledges that he is worn out. The last we see of him he is praying before the bust of his beloved mother. She is, of course, on a pedestal. ''City of Women'' makes some points less subtly than others.
Though the film is overlong, even for a Fellini aficionado, it is spellbinding, a dazzling visual display that is part burlesque, part satire, part Folies-Bergeres and all cinema. As Snaporaz is haunted by the phantoms of all the women he has known, or wanted to know, from childhood on, Mr. Fellini in ''City of Women'' is obsessed by his own feelings toward women, by his need for them, his treatment (mostly poor) of them, his continued fascination by them and his awareness that (thank heavens) they'll always be different.
To interpret ''City of Women'' as antifeminist would be, I think, to underrate the complexity of the man whose vision this is. As in so many of his films, including the beautiful but dour ''Casanova,'' Mr. Fellini never for a minute forgets his own his guilts, his fears of impotence, even as he is allowing himself to enjoy the prospect of some new encounter that may lead him one step closer to the ideal woman, which, as he knows perfectly well, is a self-defeating concept.
Mr. Fellini obviously adores women as much as he adores making movies, especially movies that find substance in gaudy artifice, that have the shape of dreams, of images freely associated, occasionally of spectacle that is its own justification, as is a show you might have seen at the old Paris Lido.
Mr. Mastroianni has never been better than he is here as the nowwell-seasoned Fellini surrogate figure. It's a supremely accomplished performance, modest and grand, broadly comic at times, even touching in its details. One special highlight: Mr. Mastroianni's doing a brief, elegiacal, Fred Astaire turn to the music of ''Let's Face the Music and Dance.'' There is, though, no other single image in the film that equals the sight of Mr. Mastroianni's Snaporaz as he creeps under a bed, in pursuit of some new mystery, with a small hole in his left sock. It's at this moment that he finally surrenders his dignity. Forever.
There's also something extremely satisfying in the film's concluding sequence in which Snaporaz rides a roller-coaster-like chute down through his adult life into his childhood, the roller coaster's structure appearing to be an adaptation of the rocket launching pad that Guido, the blocked film director of ''8 1/2,'' never found use for.
Mr. Mastroianni's is the only principal role in the film, but there are fine contributions by a number of other people, including Anna Prucnal, a Delphine Seyrig look-alike, who plays Snaporaz's beautiful, neglected wife; Ettore Manni, who plays the exhausted Xavier, Bernice Stegers, as the woman on the train, and Donatella Damiani, a new Italian beauty, who turns up in a number of enigmatic roles.
Though ''City of Women'' is about a libertine, it's anything but licentious. Mr. Fellini's licentiousness suggests a profound longing for some kind of protective discipline, if not complete chastity. As such discipline would destroy Snaporaz, it would make impossible the conception and production of a film as wonderfully uninhibited as ''City of Women.''
CITY OF WOMEN,
directed by Federico Fellini;
screenplay by Mr. Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi;
screenplay collaboration by Brunello Rondi;
director of photography, Giuseppe Rotunno;
film editor, Ruggero Mastroianni;
music by Luis Bacalov;
Running time: 138 minutes.
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