City Of Women Blu-Ray Review (Masters Of Cinema Release)

City of Women was one of the great Federico Fellini’s very last films. It along with most of later work commercially and critically unsuccessful. It premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1980 and was lambasted by the critics and even fellow filmmakers like the great but miserable sod Andrei Tarkovsky who called the film “worthless”. However the film is about as Fellini-esq as you can get and deserves reappraisal.

The film is about the middle age Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni) and Snàporaz like all of Mastroianni character’s in Fellini’s films is the director’s alter ego (this is most obvious in 8½ and it’s also his first lead role in a Fellini film since 8½). Snàporaz is on a train going home but he sees a big breasted women and they have brief fling in the bathroom but it’s cut short and the women must get off the train. Snàporaz follows her off the train and eventually finds him at a feminist polyandry conference. The film from that point becomes a bunch of increasing surreal vignettes which include roller skating, druggy lesbian post-punk teenagers who try to kill Snàporaz, attempted rape by a fat women, a court to test his masculinity among others.

The film came out after a difficult time for Fellini after some not entirety successful films he made in the wake of his classic Amarcord. What Fellini does with City of Women is to do a gloriously over the top sex farce with surrealistic touches throughout, there is hilarious sex scene which a women with an enormous ass which is obviously fake. However like Fellini’s work it’s really a film about his love/fear of women. Fellini was interested in feminism but he certainly wasn’t a feminist despite the fact the women in the film he certain sympathies with because they being mistreated by the male population. He certain makes the feminists in the film laughably absurd but Snàporaz is as well and the character Dr. Katzone with his mansion full of sexual art and absurd phallic sculptures.

The film’s centrepiece is the well-known scene after he crawls under his bed he enters a dreamlike slide where he revisits all childhood crushes. Which is beautiful filmed by Giuseppe Rotunno (who later worked with Fellini’s disciple Terry Gilliam) and constructed.

Overall the film is a really fun surrealist romp though the loves and desires of Federico Fellini, it’s not 8½ but what is? It isn’t without it’s flaws however, it’s a bit too long and has some over dubbing ever on a film, most evident in the conference scene in the beginning. Worth checking out especially with Masters of Cinema’s beautiful hd transfer.

Ian Schultz

★★★★☆

Rating: 18
BD/DVD Release Date: 25th February 2013 (UK)
Director:Federico Fellini
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Prucnal, Bernice Stegers
Buy City Of Women: DVD / Blu-ray

Federico Fellini's City Of Women Gets Masters Of Cinema Blu-Ray Release

CITY OF WOMEN [LA CITTÀ DELLE DONNE / LA CITÉ DES FEMMES] will be released as part of Eureka Entertainment’s MASTERS OF CINEMA Series on Blu-ray & DVD on 25 February 2013

Eureka Entertainment have announced that they will be releasing a gorgeous new HD restoration of the long out-of-circulation epic CITY OF WOMEN [LA CITTÀ DELLE DONNE / LA CITÉ DES FEMMES] by the legendary Italian director Federico Fellini (La strada, Nights of Cabiria, La dolce vita, 8-1/2, Amarcord) on Blu-ray & DVD on 25 February 2013.  The film is an unprecedented cinematic spectacle, produced in part by France's Gaumont Studio, and stars the most famous Italian actor of the 20th Century, Marcello Mastroianni, reprising his 8-1/2 role.

Federico Fellini's epic 1980 fantasia introduced the start of the Maestro's delirious late period. A surrealist tour-de-force filmed on soundstages and locations alike, and overflowing with the same sensory (and sensual) invention heretofore found only in the classic movie-musicals (and Fellini's own oeuvre), La città delle donne [City of Women] taps into the era's restless youth-culture, coalescing into nothing less than Fellini's post-punk opus.

Marcello Mastroianni appears as Fellini's alter ego in a semi-reprise of his character from 8-1/2, Snàporaz. As though passing into a dream, the charismatic avatar finds himself initiated into a phantasmagoric world where women — or an idea of women — have taken power, and which is structured like an array of psychosexual set-pieces — culminating in a bravura hot-air balloon that decisively sticks the "anti" up into "climax".

A great adventure "through the looking-glass," as it were, of Fellini's own phallic lens and life-long libidinal ruminations, La città delle donne sharply divided critics at the 1980 Festival de Cannes, some of whom had merely anticipated a nostalgic retread of the earlier Mastroianni works. What they were greeted with, and what remains today, is, in the words of Serge Daney, "a victory of cinema". The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present La città delle donne on Blu-ray and DVD in Gaumont's glorious new HD restoration.

SPECIAL BLU-RAY AND DVD EDITIONS:

• Glorious new HD restoration of the film, presented in 1080p on the Blu-ray.

• Newly translated optional subtitles.

• Substantial booklet containing writing on the film, vintage excerpts, and rare archival imagery.

• More features to be announced closer to the release date!

Pre-order:CITY OF WOMEN [LA CITTÀ DELLE DONNE / LA CITÉ DES FEMMES] (Masters of Cinema) (Blu-ray) [1980]