CITY OF WOMEN Movie Review

La Citte delle Donne

This big, colorful Fellini circus is a gloriously un-PC extension and expansion (not necessarily deepening) of the sexual fantasies in which he gloried in 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits, and then embalmed in the self-flagellating, interminable Casanova. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I found City of Women a sweet, poignant, and—dare I say it?—honest carnival of sexual anxiety, regret, and celebration. Since it's true that this garishly spectacular, stylized parade of fetishes, pneumatically adjusted bodies, and lascivious lip-licking probably wouldn't be watchable without Marcello Mastroianni in the lead, one thing ought to be pointed out: Marcello Mastroianni is in the lead. We've been through a lot with this great actor, and over the decades he has become—through the screen persona he and Fellini fashioned—a very close friend indeed. As Guido (a.k.a. Snaporaz), the hero of City of Women, Mastroianni plays that friend of ours whose mid-life crisis has reached critical mass; we don't need to endorse or disavow his individual fantasies to be touched by this extraordinary yet common man who is still puzzled and eternally enslaved by the very idea of woman. In this hallucinatory, sexual rendition of A Christmas Carol, Marcello/Guido/Snaporaz, in visiting the women he's loved, the women he's feared, and the women he's invented, finally comes to realize that in the truest sense, he's invented them all.

NEXT STOP … 8 1/2, Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, Star 80

1981 (R) 140m/C IT Marcello Mastroianni, Ettore Manni, Anna Prucnall, Bernice Stegers; D: Federico Fellini; W: Federico Fellini; C: Giuseppe Rotunno; M: Luis Bacalov. VHS NYF, FCT