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Librarian's Comment: Federico Fellini’s City of
Women is a rich, expansive cinematic work that explores the
complex web of projections about women that flow from the
male mind. Fellini places the eye of his camera inside the
mind of his chauvinistic central character, a man who is
obsessed with his own narrow pursuit of the “ideal woman,”
and runs himself ragged in search of her. Always willing to
have another go at the quest, regardless of the ignominies
he has suffered in his prior efforts, he plunges headlong
into one misadventure after another, pursuing the hinder
parts of women as assiduously as he flees confrontation with
their own real demands. So long as nubile females beckon, he
is prowling the bedroom, eager for the encounter, but let
his wife threaten to unleash her passion, and he draws the
covers up to his chin. The action moves from the fertile
chaos of a hotel that has been taken over by hundreds of
feminists in the full cry of battle, eager to demonstrate,
legislate, and castrate, out to the open road, where he
participates in a drugged out joyride with three carloads of
possessed nymphets whose rhythmic contortions tax his self
possession, to the fortress of Zuberkock, the final holdout
against the encroaching feminazis who threaten his male
domain, to the bowels of the women’s underground, where he
is held prisoner with other recalcitrant males, and finally,
to ever more dreamlike realms where he continues his pursuit
of the ideal woman and encounters at every turn the pathos
born of his own projections. |
