Fellini's flair for carnival modulates into full-on burlesque in this tall tale of a man who impulsively leaves a train mid-journey and finds himself in a sexual dreamworld, surrounded by women of every age, stripe and persuasion. Although it reuses plenty of images and ideas from 8½, City of Women is a lighter, raunchier and less oblique work, and certain sequences – the flying cars, the Fred Astaire bit, the grotesque brothel – feel like they're straining at the erotic limits of the medium. It's a masterpiece of kink; a feature-length episode of Scooby-Doo written by Susan Sontag; and I'm a wee bit concerned by just how much I dug it.

I don’t want to be ungracious to Fellini but I have to say that I found City of Women to be a very difficult film to engage with. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I struggle with Fellini’s treatment of women in his films. His tendency to fetishise, infantalise and idolise women is seldom balanced by empowered, fully realised female characters, central or otherwise.

So why, oh why would he embark on a cinematic exploration of male female relations in (then) contemporary Italy?

Read my rant in full at cuedotconfessions.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/focus-on-federico-fellini-city-of-women.html

Flat, considering the invention. Kusturica is Fellini with timing.

The later works of Federico Fellini, one of the most influential film directors of the modern age, are rarely discussed in the same hushed tones of reverence usually reserved for his more widely acknowledged masterpieces such as “Nights of Cabiria” (1957) “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “Amarcord” (1973), yet 1980’s “La citta delle donne” (“City of Women”) is as glorious and outrageous a spectacle of cinematic imagination as could ever have been conceived elsewhere.

Continue reading my review at Horrorview.com: www.horrorview.com/movie-reviews/la-citta-delle-donne

Beautifully updates and further undermines Fellini's 8½ persona, revealing a man who once fashioned himself to be the very model of modernity as woefully out-of-touch, and even further removed from the women he purports to love. Heartbreaking for its commentary on how little people change or learn from their experiences, and how we keep repeating the mistakes of our past. Never mind it being just a blast to watch, increasingly, wildly inventive and chaotic, never settling on even one mode of expression, yet feeling totally, inextricably of a piece.

Fellini's flair for carnival modulates into full-on burlesque in this tall tale of a man who impulsively leaves a train mid-journey and finds himself in a sexual dreamworld, surrounded by women of every age, stripe and persuasion. Although it reuses plenty of images and ideas from 8½, City of Women is a lighter, raunchier and less oblique work, and certain sequences – the flying cars, the Fred Astaire bit, the grotesque brothel – feel like they're straining at the erotic limits of the medium. It's a masterpiece of kink; a feature-length episode of Scooby-Doo written by Susan Sontag; and I'm a wee bit concerned by just how much I dug it.

Somewhat difficult to get a handle on, this demented look at the male libido and the female resistance to it is never as exciting as it needs to be, but there is interest there if you can survive the onslaught and thin characterisation. More on the site.

I don’t want to be ungracious to Fellini but I have to say that I found City of Women to be a very difficult film to engage with. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I struggle with Fellini’s treatment of women in his films. His tendency to fetishise, infantalise and idolise women is seldom balanced by empowered, fully realised female characters, central or otherwise.

So why, oh why would he embark on a cinematic exploration of male female relations in (then) contemporary Italy?

Read my rant in full at cuedotconfessions.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/focus-on-federico-fellini-city-of-women.html

La città delle donne

While the themes and the structure are instantly recognizable from other Fellini films, City of Women still is one of the master's better later works. It can be seen as a less serious companion piece to Eight and a Half.

Kind of shrill and not very subtle, but nonetheless fascinating. Marcello Mastroianni plays "Snaporaz" (Fellini's nickname for the actor), who gets lost in a nightmare world where he is confronted with feminism, absurd satires of machismo and sexual fantasies and confusion. This film doesn't seem to have a very good reputation, even among Fellini fans, but I was mostly enthralled with its strange, unpredictable rhythms, visually astonishing sets, sense of humor and dreamworld logic. The cinematography (by Guiseppe Rotunno, who did a number of other Fellini films, as well as All That Jazz, with which this picture shares some similarities) is delightful and the score is a mix of the usual carnivalesque tunes and eerie, more modern sounds... and one hell of a great Italo-disco song. Some parts are annoying or just too long, but overall it's my favorite of Fellini's later career, a surreal amusement about masculine fear and self-loathing. Rating: Very Good