Fellini Flouts Feminism in Film

Man meets woman on tedious train trip. Woman makes eyes before ostentatiously setting off for the bathroom. Man follows, panting. When they're locked in the bathroom together, just on the verge of--oops, my stop, says woman. If the protagonist of "City of Women," Snaporaz (Marcello Mastroianni), thinks this lady's a tease, just wait to see what her friends have in store for him when he follows her to a feminist convention.

Snaporaz gets to rollerderby with a flock of latex-clad women before one of the hussies pushes him down the stairs on his skates. He gets to ogle kinky calisthenics before being chased by an inflexible feminine mob. He gets to squeeze into a convertible with a bunch of babelicious teenyboppers before they try to make roadkill out of him. He catches a lift from a clucking, jowly matron on a motorbike who pins him down in the seedshed and tries to rape him.

Fellini takes titillating male fantasies and reduces them to harpy-plagued nightmares. The film lingers on that fine line between seductress and snake--or between lechery and misogyny, depending on your point of view.

But Fellini does not dwell on any one episode long enough for the audience to set its PC compass. Snaporaz flits between aging but incorrigible Romeo and misunderstood old man. His female assailants behave with both sympathy and cruelty. The action lurches from suffragette rallies to phallus-filled boudoirs, from women-run dungeons to sexual fair-grounds for men. The movie builds its perspective on the pace and variety of many surreal sexual encounters, rather than a single moralistic take on the war between the sexes.

Unsurprisingly, many of these episodes must have meant more to a sixty-something Fellini in 1980 than to the average contemporary movie-goer. The vision of tightly tank-topped biker chicks possessed by a rock and roll frenzy looks more comic than frightening. The faint soupcon of lesbianism seems a little timid and fastidious by today's standards.

But Fellini's palpable presence troubles the audience in more than this superficial manner. At one point, when Snaporaz is wandering around the convention of feminists, Fellini has the dame from the train point out our hero and accuse him of merely feigned sympathy for women. The viewer cannot help but identify Snaporaz with Fellini, and level the same accusation at the director. The film includes enough male titillation, and enough parodied feminism, to call its emancipated credentials into question. It's unclear whether Fellini is part of the solution or the problem.

The real problem lies in giving the title "City of Women" to a film about men. Snaporaz as protagonist and Fellini as director inevitably give much more insight into men and the the male perception of the sex war than into gender relations themselves. The hysterical portrayal of the medallioned, chest-wigged Casanova on the verge of his carefully catalogued ten-thousandth conquest comes across much better than the rather insubstantial angry feminazis. The plot is just as dominated and enslaved by the experiences of Snaporaz as a housewife is by the male oppressor.

Indeed, Fellini controls this movie as only he can. The circular plot leaves Quentin Tarantino blushing. The diversity and clarity of his flights of fancy sweep the viewers off their feet. But that variety only masks Fellini's focus on his hero and his gender, at the expense of the embittered woman the film purports to bring to life.

Before you see a single fra me, in the first seconds of "City of Women," a mocking female laugh rings out in the darkened auditorium like a challenge. But Fellini gets the last laugh.