Movies like City of Women

It's a French-tinged surreal comedy that stages a man's awkward intrusion into a women-run phantasmagoric world and uses that intrusion to test questions of gendered power and comic discomfort. The surface plot is simple and deliberate: a charismatic protagonist pursues an alluring stranger from a train into a forest and then into a hotel where a feminist conference has transformed routine social spaces into an uncanny arena. That premise supplies a steady engine of incidents — pursuit beats, social friction, and ritualized hospitality — which the film treats as material for satire rather than straightforward farce. Where the film earns attention is in its formal choices and tonal friction. Economy of pacing and repeated set pieces turn the hotel into a stage, and the direction favors wide-anamorphic framing that flattens corridors and vestibules into surreal planes; occasional fluid-camera moves break the framing to register disorientation. The combination of a measured narrative pulse and phantasmagoric staging lets comic moments sit beside moments of genuine unease, so the viewer is always negotiating whether to laugh or to register critique. This is a work that leans on French cinematic surrealist lineage and satirical tradition to make the social logic of its scenarios legible. Because the film keeps the protagonist largely on the outside, it foregrounds questions of identity, belonging, and the politics of male entitlement without spelling them out. Its persistence as a curious, provocative entry comes from the tension between comic set pieces and a willingness to unsettle audience sympathies; that tension makes repeated viewings rewarding for spectators interested in form and social subtext.