Identification of a Woman (1982)

 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach and Tonino Guerra

Cast: Tomás Milián as Niccolò; Daniela Silverio as Mavi; Christine Boisson as Ida; Veronica Lazar as Carla; Enrica Antonioni as Nadia; Marcel Bozzuffi as Mario

Canon Fodder

 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s last theatrical film to be full directed by the man, and this is to be addressed later on, is very much inclined to his older films from the sixties into the seventies. A filmmaker Niccolò, played by Italian genre film stalwart Tomás Milián, is caught in a bind unable to figure out what film to make, struggling with the desire to film a tale of a woman to even find the face to represent this. Solace comes from a woman from a highly privilege family named Mavi (Daniela Silverio), a younger woman where the chemistry is immediately between her and Niccolò, but with people warning him to stay away from her and obsessed with her themselves.

Antonioni’s films are arguably an acquired taste, blasphemous to say, but his films from L'avventura (1960) on eschewed directly following its plot and instead finding human drama within their template. It is a premise here for a thriller, with a Brian De Palma film hidden in the bushes which never came to be, but the plot is a template instead for a mood piece, of the characters trying to grasp at straws, existential or otherwise, as the narrative template continues. There is a curious nature to his films though in how, for their legacy of opaque existentialism they all present curious touches of accessibility or an interest in the world around them in culture, this in itself observing the world within these films as they grow older and the times followed. Blowup (1966) was, notably, the film catching the era of Swinging Sixties London onscreen with considerable success as a release, and afterwards his career marked fascinating crosspollination, be it working with Jack Nicholson on The Passenger (1975), and Zabriskie Point (1970) having a score composed by Pink Floyd. Here we get a really curious turn in the auteur's career, having reached the nineteen eighties with its idiosyncratic aesthetic and kitsch aspects upon reflection especially when seen in the time after. One did not expect an Antonioni film to be scored with the likes of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Tangerine Dream, the later prolific in composing actual film scores at the time, but the synth music befits the tone. Indeed, after the glamorous sixties Italy of the middle to upper class the director once tackled, now the passing of time presents a new layer of meaning to the proceedings now they are in this new time two decades later and all has changed. Considering Antonioni was in his seventies making this film, time has changed considerably. For him Tangerine Dream, and a sci-fi film which Niccolò eventually considers making when reading of the sun expanding and ecological fears of the worlds, mark the time capsule changes he considered of this era, his obsessions over the years changing with the world itself as depicted in the films.

Class divide is here too, with Mavi from the rich and Niccolòa film maker wandering their midst literally at a party, where now unlike before they are the ones leaving Italy, now the ones growing grey and old. Especially with Red Desert (1964), the last film he made in Italy before travelling the world until this one, his interest in the place of people within the world, especially as it technologically advances as with Red Desert, continues here with the aesthetic and the pop music. The tale is timeless, ultimately a thriller which ultimately reveals no secrets, no conspiracies, merely fickle human relationships, one which bring in Ida (Christine Boisson), a dancer Niccolò becomes entwined with as, halfway through the film, Mavi disappears and becomes the allusive figure as if in a film noir plot. Struggling with his own existential concerns, the need to make a film contrasted with having gone through divorce, Niccolò finds himself between Mavi, whose film noir plot-like aura is a mystery, and Ida, who is brutally honest and emotionally sincere in violent contrast. Identification of a woman as a title is literalized here with one man forced through two sides, and the consequences of love and passion. It is a film that, if this was any other director on hand, could have become an Alain Robbe-Grillet plot in how, in the end, the mystery of a disappearing woman is itself merely a game. Where it is a Michelangelo Antonioni film is how, by the end of this journey, there is no profound message to be had but the layers and contradictions of Niccolò himself, oblivious to a lot of what he experiences, are the concern.

It is also an existential work in terms of desire as with potentially the most contentious aspect of the film, how sexually frank it is but from a male gaze. You get into a world where even if Antonioni's gazes on them, as figures of desire and also their bared bodies, the women even with minor characters Niccolò encounters are a lot more complicated than the ideal he is trying to cast for his film. The responsibility of a relationship is forced onto him to consider, and they are no longer figures of a male desire. Be they bisexual or women who have their own personal fantasies, as he finds conversing with one young woman at an indoor swimming pool, women are not the figures for him to project his ideals on, as with the case of that particular young woman who is proudly and brazenly frank about her sexual desires which do not even need men involved. His sister being a gynecologist, and the matter-of-factness of this, suggests there is now a world beyond Niccolò's, and honestly, this points a contrast in spite of the fact Antonioni did start having a greatly obsession with the erotic and the feminine body as he got older. It was there as far back as Blowup and increased as he was allowed to be more explicit in depiction. His last work for example, a segment for Eros (2004), a curious trilogy with Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderberg where Kar-Wai’s segment The Hand was the one acclaimed. Michelangelo Antonioni's segment, The Dangerous Thread of Things, in which he returns to the idea of desire, a romantic triangle in which the man of a heterosexual couple is attracted to another woman, could have easily been an accusation of being a dirty old man as it involves two young women in complete nakedness in dance moves by their ending. Even in context though, it was a curious production for his final ever piece of created art, as elusive as anything else he made beforehand. Art which is made by men fixated by women, the idea of them trying to understand the opposite sex they are separated from in centuries of ritualistic decisions and cultural norms, is one which is rightly challenged more steadily in the time passing, because of the male gaze, because women have rightly taken their voices and projected them, and also because it is becoming more complicated as a subject now sexuality is more talked about in its diversity alongside transgender politics, which scrutinizes what the concepts of "male" and "female" gender in human society really are, including the possibility they were merely placeholders and sacred cows, not truth. That short film is one I refused to dismiss, a work needing a proper dissection in a review to deal with whether it was a good work, and likewise Identification of a Woman complicates itself as, whilst intentionally meant to be erotic at times, the nudity and the sex scenes here are contrasted by its subject. They centre on what is clearly a narrative a man who is becoming increasingly disconnected and visibly ignorant of the women he is dating. The obvious, his goal to create a film with a female lead only to struggle with doing so, is blatant in meaning.

It is telling, even if you think the explicitness of Identification of a Woman is biased in the eroticization of women, that it however presents the scenes here in a matter-of-factness – there is less of the coy and arguably more problematic aspects of erotica here, when the characters can do something as benign as even use a toilet naked and not to be seen as a taboo whilst doing so. Niccolò is ultimately a figure challenged in two ways too, Mavi the figure whose world, of threats in ice cream stores and her decision to move on, force him through games, whilst Ida in vast contrast is someone who wishes to have someone who treats her as a complex person rather than just a figure of desire, challenging his perceptions of how to treat a woman as a figure, more prominent considering his desire to make a profound film with a female lead could seen hypocritical when he is divorced, with no explanation what caused it, and that he ultimately is one cannot really take the weight of responsibility one should have in a true romance for the other person. This work is at least the older statesman in the director admitting Niccolò is a man out of time and a putz whose ideas of women are of no knowledge. It befits the fact, in a world of Time magazine articles lust over women here, or his own inability to cast a film with the right actress, with his wall full of photos and replicas of paintings cut out trying to cast it, that the man we are with the centre of is not some chauvinist hero to cheer. He is instead a man drowning in the deep end of complex emotions, and women being more than ideals, whether he likes it or not.

The power of the film comes from its visual eye, which is undeniable with the grace of cinematographer Carlo Di Palma at Antonioni's side, the work not being driven by plot and instead assisted by the striking images and worlds these characters are within, beautiful throughout let alone also capable of isolating their protagonists. The sequence of a fog covered road in a car, the cutoff point in the film of its two major acts, is incredible, a reminder that Michelangelo Antonioni's work is entirely dependent on their worlds and how the characters are placed within them for a great deal of the internal psychology. In that scene, literalized in the fog, the final breakdown in communication between Niccolò and Mavi transpires, obscured in what feels like a supernatural sequence by the director's standard, still achingly beautiful visually as a scene if the intent clear in meaning. The power of the film, though its contents can be with great discussion of their depth, come knowing what was brought up earlier in this review, this being the last theatrical film Antonioni was able to complete by his own skill. After this film, Antonioni would tragically have a stroke, which would leave him unable to speak¹, but he would still able to make more films. Eros' segment, his last ever production before his 2007 death, came after Beyond the Clouds (1995), a feature length anthology film which was collaborated upon with Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker an admirer of the director who, in the ultimate act of kindness, assisted the ailing idol of his on the set, making this a co-directorial production even if made with the idea of Michelangelo Antonioni being the figure in the centre of its creation. As the final production, done entirely with his own voice, Identification of a Woman befittingly raises many questions but holds its cards on what any of the answers are. It does present other questions - that of the sexual content, not even in terms of whether he is justifiable as an older male director in having it, but how it strikes out against films from his past which found ways around not having them, or how the eighties, contrasting its chic with grey Italian urban locations, is its own curious beast for him to scrutinize. It is also undeniably the old guard managing to stand out, even if tragically not making another film in that decade, by that point not a popular director and forced to step aside by young and trendy filmmakers, but showing a thing or two just from single scenes in this of how an image, a mood and atmosphere with his collaborators can just create enough emotional power by themselves, even something as seemingly banal (and perversely humored) like the threat Niccolò gets from a thug in an ice cream shop of all places. The final image, that suggests the strange concept post-Star Wars of a Michelangelo Antonioni sci-fi film, with a spaceship in burning red space set to synthscape, is a tantalizing image of what could have been. It is less a pastiche but suddenly the man in his seventies making this film showing a capacity to still learn new ways to tell his obsessions. This was deprived of us, but as with the magic of the film grounded on earth beforehand, this one shot is enough to linger and lodge in the brain.

====

1) Sense of Cinema's Great Directors biography on Michelangelo Antonioni, written by James Brown and publishes May 2002.