The conceit and premise of City of Women, another film by Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, is the kind that if Fellini didn't come up with, he'd take it and make it his own almost by principle. There's an absolutely wonderful sequence in 8 1/2 where Guido is having a very vivid dream where he is surrounded by women, seemingly ALL the women, that have made an impact in his life. Scorsese once noted about this scene that with Guido he can worship them, hate them, love them, ignore them, but he can't control them. This is very much true in that scene (which includes at one point Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni, having to use a whip as if the ladies are literal lionesses), and it's the same in this film, where Marcello (this time named just that) gets off of a train (by accident, of course) to follow a rather seductive woman into the woods. This leads him into a giant house filled with... women, ALL the women, any kind that you could think of.
Well, almost, anyway, the others are outside the house and Marcello will soon thereafter meet them too. But the point is, Fellini was bound to make a full-throttle, no holds barred cartoon on feminism, and City of Women is at its most, uh, Fellini-esque (that's a term, right?) when he just lets his women go into their mania and as he and cinematographer Giusseppe Rotuno try to keep up (or maybe the DP is trying to keep up with Fellini, if that makes sense).
When Marcello arrives at the first place, there's seemingly hundreds of women, and by and large they're all out to pinpoint just what it is about men they can't stand... seemingly, it's all of it, but mostly it's their domineering sense of entitlement and how they go around thinking only with their genitals. It's so startling a place but Fellini keeps things moving by having it change from lots of women talking at once about what they would/could do to a man to take him down a notch or two, to being (somewhat) quiet while watching a film about old-time feminists in the movies.
All the while Marcello watches and tries to be on the sidelines. When he is caught in the ladies cross-hairs (of course pictures were somehow taken of Marcello acting like he wanted to kiss the mysterious train woman), he leaves, and simply wants to get back to his train. As you can imagine, Fellini doesn't make it that simple, and City of Women becomes a sort of (mostly) rapid-fire odyssey through the wild and crazy ways of women. I think that because Fellini takes things to such exaggerated lengths - and it's almost to places he hasn't quite gone to before, simply with sexual content and innuendo, only Casanova comes close really - and it's so cartoonish that the satire works.
Fellini has these garish, over-the-top figures of femininity, and there are even a couple that want to bed Marcello (like, say, the older lady who offers to first drive Marcello and proceeds to practically sodomize him, only for *her* much older mother to storm in to stop it). But mostly they're out to be at best beguiling and at worst murderous, such as the squad of teenage girls (some maybe younger) driving cars and blasting rock at night and making it so that Marcello has to run away from them driving after him.
I think that two things make this madness work so well more than anything, and this is aside from the mesmerizing camera work and (as usual for this director) eye-catching and just magical production design: Mastroianni's performance, as he centers the film into something for us to react to - we may not totally identify with him (actually, I hope most men don't, he's basically a middle-aged horn-dog deep down), and that there are a few scenes in the second half where Marcello somehow (it's a long story) runs into his wife and they have a heart to heart about what's gone on wrong in their marriage. It's not that suddenly everything gets deathly serious, but the wife, Elena (Prucnal, a very good actress) is very drunk and expounds about all the ways that Marcello has disconnected from her. It feels real enough to suddenly make this more than just a series of episodes through the feminine ego-id-super-egos run amok.
There are moments here and there where it comes close to lagging, or when Fellini is indulging himself so much in his set-pieces of female mania and their lines topping one over another and another. But there's so many brilliant little moments that add up to being an enjoyable, eye-opening experience that has poetic weight. Some of this is just Fellini having a gas; when Marcello is in a hallway and it's like an art exhibit, where he can flick a switch next to the 'canvas' and a woman's portrait pops up and her making sounds of orgasmic delight, and Marcello can't help but click one off and one on musically, it's among the funniest things Fellini's ever concocted. And it leads up to a sequence that is at first exhilarating in a semi-autobiographical way (it feels like a call-back in small part to 8 1/2 again, but more fractured) and then terrifying as him becomes basically the circus exhibit for an audience of women (maybe the same from before) to ogle and throw things at.
In short, it's following Fellini, his alter-ego, and an entire cadre of gorgeous, funny, squealing, maternal, horrifying, garish, sexy, possessed and, of course, uncontrollable women in a spectacle that only sometimes takes itself seriously, which is enough to make its points about how, deep down, some of the feminist movement - when it takes itself too seriously - is apt for mockery.
