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Category:    Home > Reviews > Comedy > Italian > Fellini's City Of Women

Fellini - City Of Women

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C     Extras: C     Film: B-

 

 

City Of Women (1980) launched the fourth and last decade of the prolific career of Italian directing legend Federico Fellini.  The world-renowned auteur was still offering fresh, consistent visions that were almost surrealistic, yet here is a man who came out of the Italian Neo-Realist movement.  That informed his early work, then he took off with his own unique style.

 

At this point, Fellini was on his last five films.  Elder directors tend to do a film that focuses on women more than usual, and this was the one for Fellini.  Like Stanley Kubrick’s underrated Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Robert Altman’s Ready To Wear (aka Prêt A Porter, 1994), Fellini had made a film explicit about the physical woman, then was cheaply branded a “dirty old man.”  This is the telltale sign of a critic, particularly female critics, who has totally missed the point of a film trying to deal with erotic themes in an adult manner.  Showing nude women is not the equivalent of perversity, with anyone claiming otherwise having major issues of their own.

 

In Fellini’s case, his films always showed his obsession with women, particularly ones with “above average chest sizes” as it were.  To then call him a dirty old man all the sudden is especially idiotic!

 

Now the film is available in a special edition from New Yorker Films, which is worthy of special editions Criterion has been issuing of the legends work, like 81/2, or Nights Of Cabiria.  It may not be his best work, but it is one of his most personal.  It may not be his most well known or artistically successful, but it may be more sadly revealing of his life than his earlier classics.  The extras here help enhance this interesting look at the director.

 

A 1.85 X 1 anamorphic transfer of the film is offered, but it is not always as vivid as one would expect such a transfer to be.  Of course, Fellini has an amazing cinematographer in Giuseppe Rotunno, who went on to shoot other Fellini films, plus the likes of Cinema Paradiso and Malena for Giuseppe Tornatore.  That makes this film look good, even when the transfer fails to be impressive.  At its best, the transfer shows the heightened colors and atmospheres typical of Fellini’s signature mise-en-scene.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 sound is monophonic, despite the film being made several years into the Dolby Stereo surround era.  Furthermore, there is a strange paradox about the sound.  It is clear, yet flat, which comes out of the age-old practice in Italian cinema of doing most or all of the dialogue in postproduction.  The sound feels like it wants to break through into stereo or even surround, but it never breaks free of the mono it is stuck with.  As a matter of fact, Fellini did not use Dolby until 1987's Intervista, his next to last film!

 

With all that said, this is still an above average presentation that Fellini fans will have no major issues with the DVD, but it is a bit color poor overall.  The heightened reality sequences shine the best, with their wild production designs.  The dubbing heightens the unreality, intentionally or not, since you can see when no ones mouth is moving, yet still hear dialogue.  In these cases, it is hard to tell if Fellini intended this, or if this was just a technical matter he did not concern himself with.

 

There is a photo gallery with only 6 stills, but they have good color reproduction.  The short behind-the-scenes piece runs only 3:23, and contains no dialogue, singing, or even words. The profiles of both Fellini & Mastroianni are unusual in the way each one is split into three sections. The sections are profiles, filmographies, and awards.  Respectively, Fellini’s segment runs 6, 4, and 6 frame pages, while Mastroianni’s runs 4, 7, and 4 frames.  His filmography could have runs longer, since he was in about 150 films, but that is abbreviated here.  The best surprise is a featurette called “Traveling With Fellini Through (pun intended?) The City Of Women.”  It runs 20:24, and features interviews with Fellini experts, including the great American director Paul Mazursky.  The director’s early films, like Alex In Wonderland, and Harry & Tonto, could be seen to have at least a bit of Fellini’s outrageousness and absurdity in them.  In the section on New Yorker, besides the usual seven page-frames describing the company and its history, there are trailers for films other than this one, including Unmade Beds, Lou Lou, Nelly, and the grossly underseen Bitter Sugar.

 

The film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Ettore Manni, Anna Prucnal, Bernice Steigers, and Donatella Damiani.  Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, Edited by Ruggero Mastroianni, Music by Luis Bacalov, Screenplay by Federico Fellini & Bernardino Zapponi, and Directed by Federico Fellini.

 


Fellini did an amazing job of retaining his directorial identity throughout his career and this film is a testament to that.  One of the reasons he is still regarded as one of the all-time great master filmmakers is because he never sold out, always took risks, was blatant about himself, brave in his content, and stuck to his truest identity.  The fact that he consistently was able to put that up on screen is the number one reason his films always draw crowds at art houses.

 

The DVD is, therefore, worth getting just to see a master filmmaker in his late prime.  It is just too bad Gaumont could not provide an even better print or transfer master.  This is a film with just too much visual detail; the kind even DVD’s fidelity can only capture so much of.  However, it is one of the more well rounded Fellini DVDs out there, so this would be one of the first titles to pick up for anyone getting into his work.

 

 

- Nicholas Sheffo


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