The reputation of Federico Fellini’s “City of Women” (1980) belies how attuned it is to cinema’s role in shaping gender relations and fantasies. The movie is now playing at Film Forum. Photograph by Everett

Throughout “8 1/2,” Federico Fellini’s famously self-referential 1963 film, a director is hounded by journalists asking questions: “Are you for or against eroticism? Are you afraid of the nuclear bomb? Do you believe in God?” The movie’s interrogating is more than just professional nuisance, however: it’s also about the director’s work and character, which seem interchangeable. Appraising the script for the director’s current project, an intellectual declares, “What monstrous presumption to think that others could benefit from the squalid catalogue of your mistakes.” When the director can’t explain himself to a reporter, another, standing alongside, gleefully answers a doubt that’s tormented creative individuals since time immemorial: “He has nothing to say!”

Fellini’s willingness to dramatize these concerns so nakedly is sometimes taken as self-indulgence, but it’s possible to view it otherwise, as a gesture that’s honest and direct. Nabokov liked to vaunt art’s “splendid insincerity”; for Fellini, whose life impossibly muddied the boundaries of truth and lies, fable and fantasy, the aim was to make films that were “sincere to the point of being indecent.” Fellini’s films amount to a strange and spectacular autobiography, magnifying their ostensible subjects—such as the city, or the provinces—while sometimes also reimagining them according to mysterious and personal dictates. Given that an abiding theme was the opposite sex, and the director’s own desirous, complex relationship with its members, such an approach could sometimes nettle. Fellini addressed the female sex directly in a late, color film with a marvelous B-movie title, “City of Women.” Often compared to a burlesque show, the film is now playing at Film Forum.

“City of Women” was released in 1980, when Fellini was sixty. While he was a celebrated fixture in Italy and world cinema in general, his best-received work, such as “La Strada” (1954), “La Dolce Vita” (1960), and “8 1/2,” was behind him. A long-unfinished project, “Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna,” continued to bedevil him. “City of Women,” which had begun a decade prior as a joint project with Ingmar Bergman—his contribution ultimately evolved into “The Touch” (1971)—looked at times like it might be similarly doomed. The movie’s creation was fraught in many ways. Producers came and went. Children were born, accidents befell people, surgeries occurred. There were deaths, including those of Ettore Manni, one of the film’s lead actors; Fellini’s factotum Ettore Bevilacqua; the mother of Marcello Mastroianni; and Nino Rota, a dear friend of the director’s and the composer who had scored all but a few of his films from the start. (Rota is also familiar to American audiences through his music in the first two “Godfather” movies.)

The hero of Fellini’s over-the-top story is Snàporaz (Mastroianni), who is basically Guido Anselmi, the director-hero of “8 1/2,” only a bit older and with more silver hair. On a train, Snàporaz snoozes and then has an encounter with a silent woman (Bernice Stegers) sharing his compartment. When the train inexplicably stalls, she walks off into a forest, that supernatural locus since fairy-tale times; in a daze, he follows her to a full and chaotic hotel. A feminist conference is under way. One of only a few men present, Snàporaz is singled out and ridiculed. He tries to roller-skate, is periodically enticed by a couple of soubrettes, and makes halfhearted attempts to leave. One of those attempts takes him to the besieged mansion of Dr. Xavier Katzone (Manni), who is celebrating having slept with his ten thousandth woman. (The character is based on Georges Simenon.) Just when Snàporaz seems on the point of realizing his fantasies with the soubrette guides, his wife materializes, and he travels by slide into a space that’s part womb, part cabaret theatre, where the different women in his life are conjured; he soon winds up before a tribunal. Judgments in “8 1/2” centered on a possible inability to love; the questions now are even more damning: “Why did you choose to be born male?,” for instance. There’s more action still, but I won’t spoil the full trajectory.

Responses to “City” were mixed, seemingly with subdued tolerance for an established maestro on one side, and some strong criticisms about the depiction of women and feminists on the other. French critics, in particular, were not impressed. Though Fellini was used to adverse responses by that stage—“La Dolce Vita” had been targeted in several articles in the Vatican newspaper, and an annoyed Calabrian audience once tried to attack a projectionist of “8 1/2”—the director was disheartened and surprised. He had solicited advice and essays from feminists while making the film and personally thought the outcome “impudent, honest, and humorous.” Some voices did air support, and the writer Natalia Ginzburg, a friend, declared the film “lovely.” Still, a common response is embodied in Angel Quintana’s 2011 monograph “Masters of Cinema: Federico Fellini,” in which Snàporaz’s fantasies are judged repellant and the movie is dismissed as self repetition, “turgid and tedious … an exaggeration of everything that is infuriating about Fellini’s later work.”

To this entertained viewer, at least, and from our own moment of gender progress and friction, an “anti-woman” take doesn’t appear so self-evident. The narrative is clearly framed as a seducer’s dream, and other complicating elements abound. While ridiculous—“Look at this beautiful leg. Do you see any varicose veins? Wrinkles are a male invention!”—the film’s diverse-looking feminists can be inspired. They sing a funny, absurdist song about what a woman without a man is like (e.g., a nose without a workshop, a somersault without a rifle); they’re tough (exercise includes flying kicks at a dummy-man’s balls); and they have the imagination to applaud when a woman, moved by the example of Snow White, decides to take seven husbands. Also, the men are caricatured types, too, clinging to old ideas of behavior as the women revel in and argue about new ones. The disoriented, continually belittled Snàporaz often seems to be looking not so much for sex as for a mother’s aid. And the character of Katzone, the ne plus ultra of womanizers, with his supersonic vibrator and interactive museum of conquests, is easily the silliest role in the movie.

The dream notes and humor in “City” have been called self-protective, as though they were conveniently deployed for sensitive subject matter—an odd reading, considering Fellini’s other films. As with a writer such as Gogol, an émigré to Italy whom Fellini liked to bring up, these dream notes are integral to his whole perspective. Mary Cantwell observed that “at the same time that [Fellini] celebrated sexuality, he made it seem ridiculous.” Might it be amplification of this aspect in “City,” or the fact that no clear answers are provided for either sex, that really irks some viewers? Or perhaps thresholds for vulgarity differ more than is sometimes admitted. Whatever the case, it’s often overlooked how the film is attuned to cinema’s role in shaping gender relations and fantasies. The theme is toyed with from the outset: aboard the train, a jumble of small children look on excitedly, as though at the couple in “North by Northwest,” as Snàporaz and his compartment-mate make questioning eyes at each other.

Fellini himself made no major claims for “City of Women” but still defended it against criticism. He referred to it as a nightmare or fable in which "the world is seen through the eyes of Snàporaz. It’s the viewpoint of a man who has always looked at woman as a total mystery.… Through the ages, from the beginning of time, I’m certain man has covered woman’s face with masks. They are, however, his masks, not hers. They are the masks of the viewer, not of the woman, and what they hide is not what they seem to cover. The masks come from the man’s own subconscious and they represent that unknown part of himself."