Fellini: La Città Delle Donne (City of Women) (1980)

Few directors are as robust in their sense of fantasy as Fellini, so witnessing his fantasies collapse in on themselves as catastrophically as they do in City of Women is something of an experience. Culminating his episodic, spectacle-driven output of the 70s before his return to narrative with And The Ship Sails On, it features Marcello Mastroianni as a kind of smutty everyman who stumbles into a rural society run exclusively by and for women. As he’s led through one surreal, convulsive tableau after another, he’s forced to confront his relationship with his mother, his lovers and women in general, although it doesn’t exactly feel as if Fellini is updating his orgiastic mise-en-scenes for a feminist climate, despite the claims of some contemporary critics. If anything, the film is fairly hostile towards feminists and the women’s liberation movement, cariacturing and conflating them with an emergent teen subculture from which Fellini is clearly alienated, most spectacularly in a scene in which Mastroianni finds himself surrounded by a heaving, lurching disco music video as he gazes wistfully on a rapidly receding cinematic past. What is striking about this feminist utopia-dystopia, however, it that it proceeds by turning Mastroianni and Fellini’s lascivious gazes back upon themselves, as if the most radical – and terrifying – thing about the feminist movement, from a cinematic standpoint, were the way in which it denaturalised the pleasure men take in looking at women. For Fellini, that pleasure has always been utterly synonymous with the pleasure of watching a cinema screen, or of watching the world full stop, with the result that City of Women feels like a devolution of cinematic fantasy more than anything else, a forerunner of Inland Empire in the way its fantasies become more free-floating, abstracted, rarefied, taking us to what often feels like the very edge of Fellini’s cinematic universe. In large part, that reflects the sheer auteurist ambition of Fellini’s sets and mise-en-scenes, the most plastic and artificial in his career to date, which is really saying something, albeit not surprising either, since auteurism often feels like precisely what is at stake here. As Mastroianni moves through the film, the backdrops become increasingly larger and more elaborate while relegating him more and more to their very peripheries, blank zones where diegetic and non-diegetic space and light collide, contiguous to the mass audiences of women that recur in most of the mise-en-scenes but never exactly identified with them either. From massive roller-rinks to greenhouse bedrooms to underground amusement parks, these spaces are less concerned to disguise their theatricality than anything else in Fellini’s career to date, which would possibly make for a largely theatrical experience were Fellini’s camera not so fluid, flamboyant and downright crazy, as if to keep that fantastic cusp between spectator and spectacle as mobile and magical as possible, as Mastroianni tries to decide whether to inhabit or elude it. Even when he’s placed squarely in the middle of the action, there’s such a perverse plasticity and monumental artificiality to Fellini's set design of that his wry naturalism – his most naturalistic performance to date – feels more and more peripheral, which is perhaps why his smutty potency gradually gives way to a succession writhing, infantile, polymorphous gestures, powerless in the face of ever more remote feminist dominatrixes, culminating with him being tucked up in bed and subjected to a retrospective of the greatest sado-masochistic icons of the silent era. For all that And The Ship Sails on ushered in a gentler, more elegiac phase of Fellini's career, then, there is a kind of finality about City of Women – it is apocalyptic in its vision and intensity, an experiment in creating the last film that, at moments, feels as if it has somehow, bizarrely, succeeded.