Although I was born in Italy, I never had the chance to see a movie by Fellini.<br /><br />Yesterday I decided to fill this gap, watching "La citta' delle donne".<br /><br />I was very disappointed, not only by the movie, but also by the commentaries included in the DVD (American edition).<br /><br />*** Some spoilers from now on *** The movie is a total mess. Everything is loud and exaggerated. There are no hints or subtleties. The message the movie aims at conveying, the difficulty of men to deal with women in the modern era with the men losing their predominant position, is screamed. For 20 minutes you can cope with such a visual and acoustic disorder, but I found 140 minutes definitely too much to bear.<br /><br />I did not find the movie funny either. For example, one of the character's name is Katzone (an Italian vulgar expression for big penis) and guess what? He is a womanizer, he lives in a house full of phallic shaped objects, he has taped the moaning of all women he has slept with, and so on and so forth. Maybe, you can laugh for one second about it, but everything is so obvious, trivial and vulgar that I found it very hard to appreciate.<br /><br />Mastroianni delivers a great performance, as usual. The problem does not lie in the actors, (actually most of them deliver great interpretations) but in the director's vision of the movie.<br /><br />The film does not flow. The sequences are not linked appropriately and sometimes are way too long: he could have obtained the very same result (shocking/amusing the audience) in half the time.<br /><br />Being the movie a dream by a man in his 50's, it is reasonable to express it in such a disorganized and convulsive way. However, I do not need to see a movie to get that feeling, my own dreams are enough.<br /><br />Fellini was very brave to propose such a theme, especially in a very rigid society as the Italian one. He wanted to be provocative and he succeeded in that dimension. However, he failed at making the audience think about those issues, being only worried at representing his own insecurities and fears.<br /><br />I also found the movie very arrogant, in the sense that it made me think that Fellini wanted the audience to believe that they were watching not only a movie but "art".<br /><br />Frankly speaking, this film is so bad that it makes any Tinto Brass production look like a masterpiece.<br /><br />In the DVD's commentary the people asked to comment on Fellini's work basically said that he was a genius. I think they do not understand what a genius is. Moreover, all the people interviewed do not explain or motivate why they think he was such a great artist.<br /><br />He might have had a different approach to things, he might have had a personal interpretation of facts, he might have broken the clichés of his time, but defining him a genius is way too much, at least for what he has done with this movie.<br /><br />I think that labeling him as a genius does not allow him to be pretentious and his movie to be pointless.<br /><br />I still hope that "8 1/2" is going to change my mind about Fellini's work.