La critique de Roger Ebert
January 1, 1981   

If there is one central image in the work of Federico Fellini, it's of Fellini's autobiographical hero being smothered by women. They come in all shapes and ages, from old crones to young innocents, from heavy-breasted mother figures to seductive nymphs. One of Fellini's favorite strategies is to gather all the women into one fantasy and place his hero at the center of it. That's what he did in the celebrated harem sequence in "8 1/2," and that's what he does throughout “City of Women.”

There is, however, an additional twist this time. Since the basic Fellini universe was created in “La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita,” “8 1/2,” and “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965), beliefs about the role of women have undergone a revolution, even in Italy. It is no longer enough that Fellini deal with the ways women tantalize, dominate, and possess his male heroes. Now he must also deal with the women themselves. For Fellini, this is probably not nearly so much fun. His idea of a liberated woman is fairly clear from the wife-character in “8 1/2” (1963). She is severe, wears tailored suits and horn-rim glasses, and wants to spoil all the fun. Fellini's hero, in that film and in “City of Women,” is named Guido, is played by Marcello Mastroianni, and wants to escape from the horn-rim types and lose himself in the capacious bosom of a thoroughly undemanding sex object.  

La critique de Roger Ebert (fin)

At the beginning of “City of Women,” however, Guido finds himself riding on a train across from a severe-looking woman in a tailored suit. He tries to seduce her. She sentences him to an imaginary odyssey through a series of sexual fantasies, most of them devoted to the unpleasant fates of men who do not have the correct attitude about women. Most of these fantasies, and indeed many of the specific images, are familiar to anyone who has seen several Fellini films. There is a long circus chute for Mastroianni to tumble down (“Juliet”), and a group of circus scenes (from half his other films), and a wall covered with portraits (remember “Fellini’s Roma”?), and an insatiable satyr, and, of course, the full-lipped, full-bosomed, smiling, and inexhaustible temptress who turns up, in one manifestation or another, throughout Fellini.

 
“City of Women” does nothing original or very challenging with this material. Although it pretends to be Fellini's film about feminism, it reveals no great understanding of the subject; Fellini basically sees feminists as shrill harems of whip-wielding harridans, forever dangling the carrot of sex just out of reach of his suffering hero. Fellini has rarely been able to discover human beings hidden inside his female characters, and it's a little late for him to start blaming that on the women's liberation movement. Is “City of Women” worth seeing? Yes, probably, even though it is not a successful movie and certainly not up to Fellini's best work. It's worth seeing because it's a bedazzling collection of images, because at times it's a graceful and fluid celebration of pure filmmaking skill, and because Fellini can certainly make a bad film but cannot quite make a boring one.

Of all the Fellini films, this is probably his most erotic…

Author: Righty-Sock (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico
16 September 2008
It is not as much a study of eroticism as it is one man's erotic fantasy about the battle between the sexes… A rich, horny Italian (Mastroianni) meets a woman on a train… When the train stops, he follows her into a lonely wood, which becomes a futuristic world of forceful women who have almost entirely destroyed completely all men in their society…

Mastroianni's character is left alive as a curiosity piece… His experiences carry him deeper and deeper into this bizarre fantasy city… The film never fully provides passion and erotic lusts, but is tickling and stimulating pleasantly none the less... Fellini's point—that women resent the fact that men are easily excited—is most effectively carried by Donatella Damiani, a buxom and very beautiful young actress who runs nearly naked throughout the movie… Although the film never tires, it never quite completes its erotic expectations either, giving priority to consider carefully its own bizarre reality… It has elements of science fiction and adventure, but is more exactly a fantasy on the estrangement between men and women...
 

Not a masterpiece but the trademark Fellini genius still shines through

Author: Asa_Nisi_Masa2 from Rome, Italy
19 March 2006
A few weeks ago, I posted a review of 8½, presently my undisputed Number 1 favourite movie. Still on the subject of Il Maestro, I've recently rewatched City of Women. This is another Fellini movie I'd watched many years ago, in my late teens, and didn't like at all back then. Well, I liked it (with reservations) this time. La città delle donne is one of the most robust, unrepressed and rough-around-the-edges explorations of the specifically Latin nature of machismo, feminism, gender rivalry and sexual politics I have ever seen.

Many people don't like La città delle donne, but like 8½ and most Fellini movies of the later period it has an extraordinary, instinctive grasp of the rhythm and symbolic power of dreams. Its irritating aspect is coupled with and impossible to separate from the grasp it has upon the potency of what our psyche hides in among its hidden, ancestral folds - in this case, Marcello Mastroianni's character's but also our very own. This movie worms its way into your own psyche in time - as with other Fellini movies, it seems to reveal scenes that are totally new and surprising, yet strangely familiar to me even though I've never seen them before.

As if I'd always been familiar with them, perhaps from a previous life - Fellini seems able to tap into a universal psychic blueprint of the soul, I think that's what it is - only a true Genius could do something like this. He gets to the emotional core of human experience, which means that even though I was never a young man who went to a brothel in 1930s Italy, as he has, there is something of the experience that I can relate to, as if it were universal. I guess the fact that things are rarely LITERALLY represented in his later movies (post-La Dolce Vita), also contributes towards this, making everything more symbolic and hence, universal.

But Città delle donne is also a shrill, over-the-top movie, grating in some ways, ridiculous, dated in others. Character-wise, Marcello is probably at his most repulsive... or perhaps I should say pathetic. But the movie, though flawed and a rehash of some other familiar Fellini themes treated more successfully elsewhere, is also delightful in parts, with a power in the use of visual symbols that I have rarely seen before, even in his own, more overall successful movies. For instance, the whole sequence in Dr Xavier Katzone's grotesque house, especially the mausoleum-like tunnel containing what is essentially the "essence" of his numerous past conquests, as well as the scenes of Marcello floating on the very originally-shaped "hot air balloon", Marcello being chased by the drugged-up teenage girl bullies in their squeaky old jalopies, etc - all scenes I won't be forgetting in a hurry.

If one really finds nothing to like in La città delle donne, it's ultimately still an important document on the gender battles that recent humanity has crossed. Perhaps Italy began these a decade or two later than, for instance, Northern European nations, but it got there eventually and in its own special, culturally individual way that can be compared to no other, since Italian men and women are not German or British or Swedish. Fellini pays tribute to that very Italian type of battle of the sexes here, stereotype-free but ever so evocatively. I have never delighted more in the never-obvious send-up of machismo as with this movie. This may be lost on non-Italian speakers but even the man's name, Katzone, is a phonetic rendering of the vulgar Italian word for... er... "big (male) genitals"! I give La città delle donne a 7½ out of 10 - I would have given it an 8 if it hadn't irritated me with its excesses in certain parts. Oh, what the hell - let's give it an 8/10!