City of Women (1981)

If there is one thing that I don’t want from the great Federico Fellini, it is a plate of reheated leftovers. Here is one of the world’s great and original voices, a visual storyteller of such personal vision that watching him retrace his steps is not only disappointing, it’s abominable.

In City of Women Fellini borrows from himself elements already covered in 8-1/2, La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits and countless other great films to make a film that is suppose to tell us what he thinks about modern women.  Well, I’ll tell you.  He objectifies women, he sees them as sex objects, he looks up their skirts and down their necklines.  He admires the sexual possibilities present when a buxom woman is in the room and he does so with his usual visual splendor.  Too bad he already covered that in Amarcord.

Worse is that when the movie is over, he never really answers the question.  What does he think about modern women?  What does he think about women in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement?  How does he see them now?  Does he still see the for their breasts or can he look them in the eye?  The movie never says.  Fellini never says because he’s a man stuck very much in the past, happy to see women as objects of jolly eroticism without ever dealing with the human being inside.