City of Women

1980 erotic nightmare

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A randy guy ends up in a city of women.

This erotic nightmare was constructed when Fellini was around 60, and it feels so much like a younger man's surreal and adventurous exploration of the mysteries of the opposite sex. With fire-eating, genital-kicking ("I won 1st prize for the best kick in the testicles."), vaginal slide shows during which Coca Cola can be enjoyed, hallways of sexual conquests and its cacophony of orgasms, 3000 RPM vibrators, Fred Astaire-esque dance numbers, tricks with a woman picking up coins and pearls with telekinetic genitalia, jaw harp use to celebrate a 10,000th sexual conquest (What was Wilt Chamberlain's instrument of choice?), whimsical ghosts and belly dancers, Laurel and Hardy impersonators, Snow White inspired polygamy, hooded shadowy roller-skating women ("They all get fever fever for my beaver beaver."), stuffed kitties in a greenhouse, dog funerals, cake urination, loads of phallic symbols, tongue lamps, an awesome car chase, and a hot air balloon, this definitely has no shortage of dreamy ideas. It's a free-flowing soup slosh of a movie, something that I imagine was courageously personal for young Fellini. Were these his fears, his fantasies, his memories, his infidelities, and his frustrations splashed on the screen?

"Couldn't you tie a knot in your dick when it was limp?" the protagonist asks the doctor character who is celebrating that 10,000th sexual conquest.
"Limp? It's never limp," is the reply.

A "Marcello again?" and a "What kind of film is this?" spoken during the opening credits made me worry that this would be too meta, but that was that for that. The first and last shots are fittingly of that classic cinema visual pun of train and tunnel, and this was this for this. It's a super-shaky train ride, though it's not vibrating at 3000 RPMs, and Marcello Mastroianni, a Fellini stand-in, looks in trouble from the get-go. He's overly randy and you just know he better hold on more tightly than he is on that shaky train ride. He gets a great first line though--"Fantastic arse." Has a lovely posterior ever gotten a man in more trouble than Mastroianni finds himself in here?

Stand-outs include a feminist song number called "A Woman without a Man" ("A woman without a man is like a somersault without a rifle," for example), slides through sexual-awakening memories and mammaries with a trio of guides, and a wife's dance in front of a big window with these undulating leaves. It's a good-looking dream with cinematography by Guiseppe Rotunno, the guy who did All That Jazz. You could say the ending is a predictable cop-out, but it's the only perfect ending there could be for a movie that flows like this.

The overall lesson, I suppose, is a timeless one--don't follow strange women from trains to forests no matter how fantastic their arses might be.