Garage Sale

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CITY OF WOMEN

Directed by Federico Fellini

Screenplay by Federico Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi

Eighteen years ago, in 8 1/2 Federico Fellini confessed that he was a director who had nothing to say, and despite the arresting imagery with which he made his mea culpa, one was more than willing to concede the point. In the next seven films he demonstrated it with ever more empty extravagance. Now, confronting this gaudily misanthropic survey of how feminism has tipped the balance of power in the war between the sexes, one finds that one has moved beyond outrage and impatience to simple weariness.

Alas, Fellini's inexhaustible stock of socko images still wows the impressionable, and forces everyone else to pay heed as his boring yet insistent voice announces verbal and visual abstractions as profundities. He justifies the gaucheries and incoherence of City of Women by passing it off as a dream work--a cliche from the time movies were as short and silent as this one is long and loud.

The dreamer is a womanizer named Snaporaz (Marcello Mastroianni). Pursuing his latest prey (Bernice Stegers) into a feminist convention, the pursuer quickly becomes the pursued--by shrill women of every age and shape, from crones to teen-age punkers. All are projections of the basic, to Fellini anyway, male fear of the castrating female--though it must be said that he is weirdly fairminded. Snaporaz finds refuge in a castle whose owner turns out to be a male chauvinist of the most repulsive sort. A gallery contains photos of his many conquests: when you flip on the light behind each picture, you get a tape recording of the women's erotic moans too.

This is a typical example of Fellini's delicacy of touch; the feminist storm troopers and the dream-within-the-dream (set, of course, in a carnival) are yet to come. In the end his Don Juan learns what all Don Juans have learned: that they are searching for an ideal woman who does not, cannot exist; that they are thus doomed to a lovelessness that makes a mockery of their extraordinary exertions in the craft of love. There are easier ways to make so banal a point.

Perhaps Fellini has become a Don Juan among moviemakers, pursuing some ultimate statement, some mega-image that does not exist and cannot be conjured up by running garage sales of the junk stored in his unconscious. But so intent is the director on this onanistic quest that he has long since forgotten that truth in art arises from the patient accretion of telling detail, distilled observation, and, in maturity, a certain ironic composure. --By Richard Schickel

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