Film > World Cinema - Classic

The culmination of Fellini’s life-long obsession with the fairer sex, City of Women stars Fellini’s favourite alter-ego, Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita, 81/2), as a modern-day Don Juan who tackles middle-age, and feminism, by attempting to bring together all the women in his life—past, present, and future! Underpinning his sexual odyssey is the fantasy that these women (representing different stages of his life) love him so much that they’d be willing to share him - but dream and reality do not easily combine. The film opens with a train entering a leaf-framed tunnel - Fellini’s homage to the erotic metaphors of American cinema - and soon the understated Mastroianni embarks on a vain yet hilarious search through a maze of beautiful women to find his beau ideal. A surreal, comic book vision of impossible love, the film’s colourful, whimsical touches could only have been created by Fellini.