PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC
Identification of a Woman (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars)
Italy: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982 (Criterion Collection)

1. Identification of a Woman. Antonioni. Why?

2. Michelangelo Antonioni, maker of Identification of a Woman (1982), L’Avventura (1960) and Blowup (1966), one of the great international filmmakers  of the 20th century, is an exemplar of that era of artistic modernism that peaked in the ’60s: the time of Godard, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Nabokov, Duras, Barthes, et. al., when matter often became more important than matter. So I’ve decided to make this a modernist review. It can be read in two ways: from the top down (Paragraph 1 to 14), or from the bottom up (Paragraph 14 to 1). Or you can make a print-out, tear it to pieces, toss them up in the air, and read it like a William Burroughs cut-up novel. The meaning doesn’t change whether you begin at the end, or end at the beginning, or vice versa. Of course, I could be wrong.

5. “My love is nothing like the sun,” Shakespeare wrote in one of his finest sonnets: a classic statement of what beauty is, and isn’t — and of what love is, and isn’t. In  Identification of a Woman, a handsome, intellectual motion picture director of few words named Niccolo (Tomas Milian) tries to recover from a broken marriage while moving in elite social circles in Rome — and drifting, drifting. Niccolo has two love affairs during the story: one with a promiscuous bisexual society woman named Mavi (Daniela Silverio), the other with an earthy gorgeous young actress from the working class, named Ida (Christine Boisson).

6. Both of Niccolo’s affairs end badly, partly because of other people, partly because of Niccolo himself: because of his sealed-off emotions, his ucertain commitment, his probable promiscuity, the way he seems separated not just from his ex-wife, but from other people in general. Niccolo and Mavi quarrel, get lost in the fog (in a great scene reminiscent of a similar fog of fear in Red Desert), one night while driving. There are shots, alarms, a mystery. He loses her. Later, he travels to Venice with Ida and she surprises him with a revelation. He loses her as well. He dreams of another film he might make: a science fiction tale about a spaceship speeding toward the sun. A film like Solaris, by Andrei Tarkovsky? Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick? Like Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, by Robert Parrish? Or like L’Eclisse (Eclipse), by Antonioni?

8. Niccolo’s lovers Mavi and Ida, the playgirl and the actress, are both roles that might have been played, in the ‘60s by Antonioni‘s stunning blonde actress-mistress-star Monica Vitti, who played neurotic women (euro-neuros?) for him in L‘Avventura, La Notte, L‘Eclisse, Red Desert — and also in The Mystery of Oberwald , the experimental film that he adapted from Jean Cocteau’s play (and movie) The Eagle with Two Heads, which Antonioni made for Italian TV two years earlier in 1980. His women tend to run together. So do these affairs. Yet Identification of a Woman is far more sexually explicit and candid than his great early 60s films, where eroticism was the pulse beneath the skin, but shown more discreetly and sparingly. It’s not as frank, or as nude, as his episode in the three-part film Eros (the other directors were Wong Kar-wai and Steven Soderbergh), an Antonioni short that sometimes looks like soft-core pornography. Antonioni was 92 when the film came out. He was 70 the year Identification of a Woman was released. And he could speak.

9. In 1985, when he was 73, Antonioni had a stroke, was partially paralyzed and afterwards unable to speak. He went on making films though, with on-set support by fellow directors like Wim Wenders (Beyond the Clouds) — who was there to take over if Anotonioni collapsed. He still co-wrote his scripts. His characters never talked all that much anyway. Instead, they took walks, They searched for something they couldn’t find. They made love. They are, we can see, in a state of angst, of alienation. “Alienation” was the word almost every intellectual film critic used when discussing Antonioni‘s ‘60s films.

10. Tomas Milian, Antonioni‘s star in Identification of a Woman, was born in Cuba and settled in Italy, where the director Mauro Bolognini (Il Bell’Antonio) discovered him and made him a movie star. Milian doesn’t look like Antonioni, who has the face of an artist and aristocrat, an alienated man. Milian looks tough, moody, somewhat like a less disturbed version of Gian Maria Volonte (the star of Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and Leone’s For a Few Dollars More). In the ‘60s and ‘70s, like Volonte, Milian was one of the stars of Italian “spaghetti Westerns”: the form mastered by director Sergio Leone and his American star Clint Eastwood. Eastwood never worked for Antonioni, but he did act for Vittorio De Sica, which seems an even odder match-up, in 1966‘s Le Streghe (The Witches) in the episode A Night Like Any Other.

12. This review can be read in one of two ways — either backwards or forwards, either from the first paragraph to the last, or from the last paragraph to the first. It is dedicated to the memory of Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter of Last Year in Marienbad), whose novels and films were modernist traps, and to William Burroughs (author of “Naked Lunch”), some of whose novels could be cut up and re-arranged and read in a new order, and to Stanley Kubrick, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favorite filmmmaker when I was in college. Read it any way you like. Or not.

13. Antonioni. Identification of a Woman. Why.

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