How does it feel to be the object of the female gaze, Mastroianni? The same question could be asked of Fellini, a director who was always accustomed to smother his male characters with beautiful, voluptuous women. From LA DOLCE VITA (1960) to 8½ (1963), from JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965) to FELLINI'S CASANOVA (1976), women have always been portrayed as seductive mysteries onto which debonair men have projected their dreams and fantasies. These films are strongly autobiographical in nature, almost behaving like extensions of how Fellini feels about himself. The sheen of cool that once defined his male characters, like Marcello, Guido, and Giogio—each, you'll recall, presented as if they could tantalize and possess any woman they desired —feels faded and regretful here, pointing to a secret shame of what a lifetime of womanizing had done to Fellini's soul. 

CITY OF WOMEN is the horny auteur's near-masterstroke apologia pro vita sua, a beguiling confession of guilt for having failed to understand the women in his life, both onscreen and in reality. If Fellini is really asking for forgiveness, I can think of no better way to sweeten the pot than to lure his once affable male lead (Marcello Mastroianni) through a frightening odyssey of feminine rage and venom, where all masculine, sex-crazed misogyny gets bullied, threatened, and humiliated into learning. The structure of the story lends itself to a kind of Dante-esque Alice in Wonderland. 

Snàporaz, played by the now older, greyer, slower Mastroianni, attempts to woo and chase a woman he met on the train down a forestry rabbit hole, which leads him to a feminist convention of the most terrifying kind. Women of every age, size, color, and shape appear inflamed and ready for revolution, tired of systems of patriarchy and expressions of "phallic narcissism." These are angry, liberated women, whose fury will scare the hell out of Snàporaz and his ilk for not having the correct attitude about women. 

Fellini's version of gender reversal satire becomes an extended nightmare, one in which men are repeatedly placed on the rack and shown their hypocrisy. In one humorous segment, Snàporaz gets abducted by a large, muscular woman who attempts to rape him in a lonely greenhouse. He has now become the sexual object, someone reduced to a woman's gaze and carnal lust. The moment mirrors his own sexual fraud back to him, as he, too, had earlier reduced the woman on the train to nothing more than a fuck buddy. Later, after escaping, he gets stalked by a group of industrial-punk girls who take him out on a joyless, Wonka-esque car ride through pitch black roads. Oh, how he longs to return to a more favorable time! By today's standards, Snàporaz longs for a pre-Weinstein era when women were submissive as puppies, when grabbing ass and copping a feel could be done without dragon feminism breathing fire down his neck. His brand of masculinity will forever feel woefully out of place among these fiery vixens.

If Snàporaz is a stand-in for Fellini, things get even weirder when he runs into another alter-ego version of himself. Dr. Katzone, a male slut celebrating his 10,000th sexual female conquest, behaves like the aging consequence of Fellini's earlier stand-ins —Marcello from LDV and Guido from 8½. There's a hidden sadness that lurks behind these characters' chauvinism, fulfilled now in Katzone, who spent his years behaving in ways he'd now come to regret. When Snàporaz discovers his wife, Elena, among Katzone's sex slaves, it becomes tempting to guess what Fellini is trying to confess. Is this the auteur's way of admitting his failure as a husband? Is he confronting his womanizing traits and inability to mature? Think back on JULIET OF THE SPIRITS for a moment. If that film is Fellini dragging his unwilling housewife through harem fantasies that tickle his pickle, then CITY OF WOMEN is Fellini lamenting that behavior, but being unable to stop it. The surreal debauchery of the Katzone mansion segment is thus another instance of Fellini retreating to fantasy when the weight of feminism became too much to bear.

The lonely struggle of chasing women that Fellini and his characters can no longer have, but can't stop wanting, is literalized in an absolutely bedazzling finale. Snàporaz is seen riding down a lavish, larger-than-life carnival slide through his adult life into his childhood, which appears to look like the very rocket structure that Guido never found a use for in 8½. Here it becomes the structure that scaffolds the memories of his sexual experiences, one that hypnotically lowers him to a blazing tribunal of women who arraign him with a lifetime of unfaithfulness. 

As it turns out, years and years of searching for his ideal woman, fueled only by lust and a need to consume, has been a self-defeating journey. What Snàporaz has become is contrary to what he wants, and, in a moment too rich to spoil, he must now decide for himself if the ideal woman he's captured is a blessing or a curse. 

Has Snàporaz learned anything from this feminist wonderland? Has Fellini? Has their lifelong odyssey of refashioning the ideal woman again and again taught these lonely men something about human decency? I dare say this might be my favorite Fellini film. I know, I was really shocked by that too. But to me it seems to amalgamate everything the auteur had been trying to articulate in previous films, something that structures the way Fellini feels about his onscreen soul. It also never nonsensically flies off the rails, like his other post-LDV stuff, but feels surrealistically grounded to something reflexively sad. True, the excesses of previous films are all still present, but the Alice in Wonderland structure really helped shape the feminist nightmare in a truly meaningful way. It's the narrative brand of character surrealism I've been waiting Fellini to execute all along.

Fellini Ranked