Fellini’s City of Women is a fantastic voyage through a man’s unconscious, a string of symbolic encounters and elaborate images held together with the logic of a dream. Marcello Mastroianni is perfect as Snaporaz, the superficially mild, typical well-dressed middle-aged man whose bizarre adventures/fantasies (which are the film) are triggered off by his desire for a woman in his railway carriage. He pursues her to a feminist convention, which he at first explores – through antiphallic workshops with women earnestly shouting ‘we must defeat fellatio’ to a large meeting with genuinely moving speeches made by older women who cast off the stigma of ‘ageing’ – and then tries to escape, himself pursued by a boiler-woman who tries to rape him, and by hordes of teenage girls. This leads him to the retreat of Zubercock, the last bastion of old-fashioned masculinity (for women rule the world outside), a decadent womanizer whose phallic castle boasts a gallery of talking pin-ups. Here at a party Snaporaz meets his wife, who criticizes his role in their marriage … and then in bed he takes off down the rollercoaster of memory, past sexual images from childhood – and cinema.
The events go rambling on, but are much less chaotic in their meaning than it appears: Fellini’s circus style, a succession of extravagant acts, is exactly suited to the dream-like function of turning thoughts into visual forms. As in a dream, the events speak not of themselves but of the dreamer. Real people, real places appear; but it is an internal landscape which is being projected. And just as it is always a wish which shapes the particular forms of a dream, so the emotional qualities of a film are not inherent in the filmed objects themselves, nor even in their fictional attributes, but are those of the drive which underlies it. Snaporaz’s movement through the film is fuelled by desire, and fear; gradually it becomes clear that the women are externalizations of his own emotions, as with the extremely sexy but violently intimidating woman on the train, who is in fact a stranger. She is so sexy, and so stern, that it is impossible not to see these aspects of ‘her’ as aspects of him, turned inside out.
So it would be a mistake to criticize Fellini for portraying women as sex-objects, or feminists as aggressive: he is doing deliberately what other directors often do less clearly: show women through the threatened eyes of Post-Feminist Male Consciousness. This post-feminist consciousness is also the theme of, for example, Godard’s Slow Motion (Sauve Qui Peut – La Vie); his mysteriously sexy and independent women are no less male inventions than Fellini’s grosser visions – they simply appear as more realistic characters, the products of observation, rather than fantasy. Most narrative films within both mainstream and ‘Art’ cinema give the illusion that their characters are relatively autonomous. But while Godard’s control of the strings is more concealed, Fellini really goes to town on visual means for revealing the flimsy construction of female figures in film. Towards the end of City of Women Snaporaz is chasing the image of the Ideal Woman: she turns out to be a larger-than-life inflated dummy, and as he floats off into the sky clinging to this giant balloon, her ‘real’ counterpart on the ground below fires a shot which crumples his dream and brings our hero down to earth.
Ultimately City of Women is about cinema, the way it is a dream, and very much a sexual one. Recent feminist film theory centres on the idea of male desire: Fellini concretizes this in one image – a huge bed which is the cinema, full of boys sharing the wet-dream of a woman on the screen. Images like this must surely have a powerful meaning for feminists, as well as Fellini fans.
(Spare Rib, 1981)