City of Women movie storyline. Marcello is in the compartment of an Italian train, facing forward when the mineral water of the woman seated across from him starts to fall toward him. He catches the bottle and makes eye contact and follows her when she leaves the compartment. For a few moments she finds him attractive too. Then suddenly she gets off the train and starts walking through a field. Marcello follows her, loses her, finds himself in a large hotel surrounded by women. A feminist conference is taking place and he tries to escape.
City of Women (Italian: La città delle donne) is a 1980 Franco-Italian fantasy comedy-drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini’s characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes toward women and his wife.
About the Story
Snàporaz wakes up during a train ride and has a brief fling with a woman in the bathroom, but it’s cut short when the train suddenly stops and the woman gets off. Snàporaz follows her into the woods, through the wilderness and into a Grand Hotel overrun with women in attendance for a surrealistic feminist convention. He winds up in a conference about polyandry, where his presence is rejected. A frightened Snàporaz retreats to the hotel lobby, but the exit is blocked; instead he seeks refuge with a girl who offers her assistance, Donatella, inside an elevator.
Donatella leads Snàporaz into a gymnasium and forces him to don roller skates. He is yet again cornered and berated by a group of angry women who circle around him in roller skates and practice testicle-kicking with a dummy. Dazed, Snàporaz makes his exit down a flight of stairs, falling down and badly hurting himself, and into the domain of a burly woman tending to the hotel’s furnace. The woman showers and offers him a ride to the train station on her motorcycle, but stops by a farm and lures Snàporaz into a nursery, where she tries to rape him.
The rape is cut short by the woman’s mother, who steps in to chastise her daughter, and Snàporaz decides to follow instead a lonely woman through the country side. He joins her and her girlfriends on a car ride on the promise of being delivered to the station, but the ride goes on well into the night and all they do is hang out high on drugs and listen to techno. A frustrated Snàporaz ditches them and is harassed by two more cars until he finds shelter in the off-limits private property of Dr. Xavier Katzone, who hails gunfire on his persecutors.
Dr. Katzone promises to deliver Snàporaz to the train station the following morning and invites him to stay on for a party. Snàporaz walks around Katzone’s extravagant household, which is filled with sexual imagery and suggestive, phallic sculptures. He is also fascinated by his collection of sexual conquests hanging as photographs from the manor walls that light up and whisper arousing dialogue at the flick of a switch.
Taking pride in his many inventions, Katzone celebrates his 10,000th conquest with an eccentric party that involves the blowing out of 10,000 candles and a performance by his wife, in which she sucks coins and pearls into her vagina by means of telekinesis. During the party, Snàporaz comes across his ex-wife, Elena, who has a drunken argument with him, and meets Donatella again.
City of Women (1980)
Directed by: Federico Fellini
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Prucnal, Bernice Stegers, Jole Silvani, Donatella Damiani, Ettore Manni, Fiammetta Baralla
Screenplay by: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi, Brunello Rondi
Production Design by: Dante Ferretti
Cinematography by: Giuseppe Rotunno
Film Editing by: Ruggero Mastroianni
Costume Design by: Gabriella Pescucci
Set Decoration by: Bruno Cesari, Carlo Gervasi
Art Direction by: Giorgio Giovannini
Music by: Luis Bacalov
Distributed by: Gaumont Italia
Release Date: 28 March 1980 (Italy), 5 November 1980 (France)
Visits: 131
