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Rating: FELLINI - CITY OF WOMEN (1980)
What the hell kind of film is this? Exclaims Snaporaz, the protagonist and alter ego of the Maestro. This cinecittà-Hollywoodian film is born from the celluloid rib of many other archetypal films in the genre of B movie, between peplum-fantasy-world movie types with naked women-Queens of the Amazons, porno-vampresses, punk-extraterrestrials, gyno-cyborgs,-islands of women alone-etc. Well, dear Snaporaz, chasing a feminist Beatrice, you've ended up in a Dantean natural burella, lost in an oneiric citadel inhabited by women of all ages: women women, male women, androgynous, angelic, perverted, maternal, virginal, toxic, punk, kapos, amazons, mystics, twins, circus performers, monstrous, lesbians, mad, housewives, latecomers, singers, actresses...but they are no longer at your service, Snaporaz, and they run disenchanted from the old harem of 8½. Little Women Grow Up, ever faster, ever more feminist, ever more masculine. And if the king is dead, long live the king... A worthy continuation of the previous Fellini Casanova, the film requires multiple viewings to appreciate its whirling visual and sonic claustrophobia, to be experienced between escape, dream, and nightmare, cradled inside a phallic train plunging into a tunnel. It's a topical journey, a film within a film, between a long carousel and a Milo Manara-style comic strip, without having to bother Melies, Bunuel... and so on up to the first filmic genome of various evolutionary attempts born in the male imagination from the Lumiere onwards...
Fellini 8½'s spaceship with its emphatic carnival from real estate tycoon of Cinema perhaps never took off like Mastorna's plane: or maybe it did... and Snaporaz truly makes his journey to the center of the Earth, or rather the planet woman: lured by the mysterious Lady of the train, priestess of feminist mysteries, the protagonist ends up in the midst of a lively and tumultuous congress of women speaking through stereotypical formulas and anti-male slogans. He is confused and defenseless, always searching for the lady of the train, and after mysterious events related to his escape attempts, the man ends up in Katzone's castle, a mature Mussolini-esque guru of eros who vegetates in a sort of sexual reliquary, made of digital sex cases, busty and provocative women, and all the symbols of the woman-object. Ettore Manni, ex poor but handsome remains there to celebrate the old Self of Snaporaz, the vitellonic shadow side of the maestro and the Latin male, the last bastion of mythical virility, crude playboy of a Dannunzian house full of phalluses and obelisks. From the castle, still very mysteriously, Snaporaz ends up in a courtroom where he finds the feminists who condemn him and moves to an arena where they should enjoy his lynching. But Katzone in the shadows watches and tries to save him: he provides him with a huge inflatable doll to escape the feminist clutches. And he rises, rises ever higher until for a moment it appears to him haloed like a Madonna perhaps his true only Ideal Woman: but it's just a brief flash, because the balloon... Insomnia, reverie, and impotence in the face of the new woman characterize this lunar and lunatic film of the Maestro, who makes Carl Jung's words his own: «The woman is where the man has his shadow, so he is often led to confuse the woman with his shadow».
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