Word: fellini
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GOOD LUCK with the motivation behind City of Women, Federico Fellini's latest baroque-nightmare-cum-flesh-fantasy. Food for thought and conversation, perhaps, but it yields no neat, coherent conceptual summary--better just to sit back and savor...
...want to know--should hear themselves talking. "Tatum and Ryan are going to be late, so I called Warren, Diane, and Misha," I heard Mick once tell our friend Reggie. "What about Jodie, Sissela, Derek, Archie, Zubin, Roman and Nastassia?" Bianca managed to reply. It was about then that Fellini and Marcello walked in. Rico and I have never been able to stay in the same room for longer than it takes to see what the other is wearing, so I left hastily...
...dreamer is a womanizer named Snaporaz (Marcello Mastroianni). Pursuing his latest prey (Bernice Stegers) into a feminist convention, the pursuer quickly becomes the pursued-by shrill women of every age and shape, from crones to teen-age punkers. All are projections of the basic, to Fellini anyway, male fear of the castrating female-though it must be said that he is weirdly fairminded. Snaporaz finds refuge in a castle whose owner turns out to be a male chauvinist of the most repulsive sort. A gallery contains photos of his many conquests: when you flip on the light behind each picture...
This is a typical example of Fellini's delicacy of touch; the feminist storm troopers and the dream-within-the-dream (set, of course, in a carnival) are yet to come. In the end his Don Juan learns what all Don Juans have learned: that they are searching for an ideal woman who does not, cannot exist; that they are thus doomed to a lovelessness that makes a mockery of their extraordinary exertions in the craft of love. There are easier ways to make so banal a point...
...Perhaps Fellini has become a Don Juan among moviemakers, pursuing some ultimate statement, some mega-image that does not exist and cannot be conjured up by running garage sales of the junk stored in his unconscious. But so intent is the director on this onanistic quest that he has long since forgotten that truth in art arises from the patient accretion of telling detail, distilled observation, and, in maturity, a certain ironic composure. -By Richard Schickel