Stylish but barely mediocre overall

A Brilliant Conflict

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I am a great fan of early Fellini, and as late as Amarcord I still find much to admire. After that, though, there seems to me to be an inexorable decline in originality. By the time we get to this film the decline is definitely in evidence throughout. Freshness has given way to trademark, vitality to predictability. Mastroianni is still there, as cool and enigmatic as ever, and some of the cinematography remains dazzling. But an air of staleness hangs over the whole film, which apart from its other defects is far too long. Fellini fanatics admire it, that much is obvious, and good luck to them. But most simple admirers will pass it by. It is worth adding that in the troubled and deeply unequal world we live in, Fellini's later obsession with the idle rich is looking increasingly frivolous. But maybe that's just me.

Continuing my Fellini quest, I found City of Women to be interesting. It is not my favourite Fellini, the pace feels sluggish at times and it is rather shrill and unsubtle in tone. On the other hand, Fellini directs beautifully with his distinctive style most evident. City of Women is visually stunning in scenery, costumes and cinematography. The music is full of cheerful energy and nostalgia, while in terms of writing the autobiographical aspects are interesting, the self-parody and satirical aspects are funny and the dream aspects are appropriately dream-like and in an enchanting way. The story shines with the personal and nostalgic style that is so distinctive of Fellini. The acting is fine, especially from the ever compelling Marcello Mastroianni, though his performances in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 are even better.All in all, interesting but I personally would have preferred more subtlety. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Film Review, The City of Woman (dir. Federico Fellini, Italy, 1980) The City of Woman directed by Federico Fellini in Italy in 1980, was a unique film about men that treat woman like garbage and that there just here for looks but Fellini wanted to make the film so men can look at woman different not just some sex slave but to be treated with respect as woman back in those days were never treated with respect well most of them and is still like that today.Fellini's character who he played was very interesting and sexiest, as in interesting is in how he spoke to woman how he thought of woman and how his role of that character was to treat woman was played out brilliantly, I noticed how the movie went on and on Fellini's character started to treat woman with more respect, like at the start of the movie he was like all rude and thought woman were just some sexy toy and he was full rude and then coming to the end of the movie you saw how he wasn't as rude to woman.The acting in City of woman I believe was very well done by Fellini but some characters looked like they were acting but still very well done as some of the acting kind of weird me out as in the movie when Fellini is in the a car with a bunch of girls and they all start making sex noises while there listening to the music it was very disturbing.The music in this movie I believe was very exotic because there was always music where ever Fellini went but it got really disturbing when Fellini got in the car with a bunch of girls and they put the radio on and the music started to play and they started making sex noises it was really gross I didn't want to watch it because it wasn't really realistic to me and again disturbing but beside that the music was exotic through out the movie.The direction in the movie was very confusing as I did not know what was happening as the story scene kept changing like at the start he was on a train then he was in the woods and then he was at a place where all these woman were and then he was almost getting raped by some fat chick and then he was in a car and then he some how new some guy at this house and he had a wife or something and I was like what is going on here and then he was put to bed and then he heard some noises and he followed it under his bed, it was a bit weird don't you think and then he went down a slide and there were people singing it was just stupid.Well I believe that this movie is good but I didn't like it because it's not my kind of movie, as I find it very slow and boring as I'm into action, thrillers and horrors, but it is well played out and also interesting but that doesn't change how I think the movie is, I believe anyone who likes Fellini's movie's to watch this because I believe they would love it.

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!