Sole Criterion: Identification of a Woman
By Brett Ballard-Beach
March 29, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
DVD Spine # 585
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was 70 the year his autumnal “anti-romance” Identification of a Woman was released in 1982. Although he remained alive for another quarter-century, and received an Honorary Oscar in 1995 (he had been nominated twice in 1967 for co-writing and directing his English language debut Blow-Up), he would only direct one more feature film, one-third of an omnibus film and several shorts and visual essays. A massive stroke he suffered in 1985 was partially to blame but the greater hindrance was an inability to be insured by the guaranty companies that cover film productions.
Wim Wenders’ involvement/presence on the set of 1995’s Beyond the Clouds (he is listed as co-director) helped to get that film - one of Antonioni’s I still have not seen - through to completion in the same way that Paul Thomas Anderson was a “back-up” or “stand-by” director on Robert Altman’s final feature A Prairie Home Companion. There is a cruel irony inherent in a man whose films deal directly and sometimes exclusively with inabilities or failures of communication to find himself “silenced,” at least in the film world, first in a physical sense (though he did regain a good portion of what he lost), and later from a financial one.
Identification of a Woman was the director’s fifth and final time competing for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and ended up winning a Special Jury Prize handed out in honor of Cannes’ 35th anniversary that year. He had previously been nominated for 1975’s The Passenger, won for Blow-Up, and received Jury Prizes as well for 1962’s L’Eclisse and 1960’s L’avventura. I only note this reception prior to and including this week’s film to indicate my astonishment that it did not end up officially opening in the United States until 1996. IMDb and an essay I recently read in one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s compilations both attest to the fact that early bad reviews from the New York critics’ contingent after it played at that year’s New York Film Festival led to its being dropped by its U.S. distributor.
As I mentioned in my first Sole Criterion column back in December, my hope was to push myself farther out with my choices, reaching out to films I had never heard of by directors I didn’t even know existed. This week is another step in that direction. I have been aware of Antonioni since I was a boy and the title Identification of a Woman for a while but until I rented the DVD from the library a few weeks ago, I had never seen any description of plot. I have held off for the time being reading any essays or thoughts on the film in order to formulate my own thoughts first-hand.
And, though it shames me to say this, I took the almost unheard-of for me measure of watching it a second time, pausing it throughout, and taking notes. I have been writing about films for over two decades and doing it (ridiculously) without making observations that I could consult then or, heaven forbid, at some as yet unspecified point in the future. I don’t feel that that is any rational way to deal with films I have never encountered or been prepped for with adverts, criticism, or film blog discussions. So I now proceed.
The specific woman of the title is never made explicitly clear, which is par for the course with Antonioni who seems to have staked and made his reputation on films with plots that can be easily relayed in a sentence or two but which become wholly ambiguous when viewed cinematically. The big picture seems perfectly understandable and lucid, but the specific details confound when one stops to ponder. Like Blow-Up’s protagonist, a photographer who obsesses at length over a picture he has snapped, convinced it contains proof of… a murder, a liaison, a conspiracy, many of Antonioni’s heroes and heroines become waylaid by similar nagging doubts, many times in relation to the physical environment around them.
Identification of a Woman opens with a spatially disorienting shot that only resolves itself a few seconds later. The camera hangs over and slightly above the entryway inside the lobby of an apartment complex. For a brief second, the architecture and the stillness call to mind the waiting area outside the elevator of The Overlook Hotel before it is (twice) consumed by torrents (Torrance?) of blood. But this isn’t a horror film or a thriller, and though there are elements of paranoia and mystery at play, Antonioni doesn’t push them too hard, either. A man enters carrying a suitcase, climbs the stairs to his apartment, fumbles for his key and notes under his breath and on a notepad he carries with him, something to the effect of “She may be gone, and with her, her suspicions. But her alarm system lives on.”
For film director Nicollo, the woman of the title could be this unseen ex-wife, one of the two disparate women he becomes involved with in her aftermath, or the elusive muse he seeks for his next, undefined project. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Nicollo represents a stand-in for Antonioni through which he can furnish an auto-critique, a point driven home late in the film by actress Ida - the second of the two women he becomes involved with, who scorns him with the putdown: “You Italian directors seem to be paid to be angry with the world.”
The audience sees Nicollo make half-hearted efforts at writing, flirting with being a director for hire on an outside project, and he is recognized by others, but largely he appears to be suffering through a bout of writer’s (and director’s) block as severe as the protagonist in Fellini’s 8 1/2, who by comparison, was also bedeviled by concurrent romantic entanglements, and at a loss on how to proceed with his current project. There was some resolution (and to an extent, joy therein) to his dilemma, if only metaphorically, but Nicollo finds no such peace. He is uneasy with himself, in his relationships, and with the world around him. This is typified by his first encounter with Mavi, the love interest whose eventual disappearance drives him to distraction. He meets her over the phone, answering it while waiting to visit his sister at her medical practice, and he asks her to verbally sketch herself, explaining that he’s “uneasy when I can’t visualize the person I’m talking to . . .”
Soon thereafter… well, actually, the dynamics of time is one of the more unsettling studies of the film. There are at least a few flashbacks that aren’t overtly announced as such and a recurring theme is to see the passage of light from day to night as the camera remains static on an interior, but otherwise Antonioni, acting as his own editor, opts for intentionally jarring cuts from one place and point in time to another that give the impression, upon consideration, of time-traveling (a not-irrelevant notion given the film’s concluding scene). Another jarring effect, done only once by my count, but producing uneasiness that spreads both forward and back through the film, is a false POV shot, created by a hidden cut. Having arrived at Mavi’s apartment to squirrel her away to a house in the country for a few days, and with well-founded suspicions that he may be being tailed at the behest of a jealous ex- (or current) suitor of hers, Nicollo goes out to her balcony and peers over to see his car below. The next second, we see Nicollo and Mavi enter from frame right and get into the car. At once the omnipotence of the director lording over the proceedings is evoked, Nicollo’s natural power one presumes, but also the sense that even as he struggles to regain authorial control, someone out there is still spying on him, someone who seems incapable of losing the upper hand.
When I think of what I identify most with Antonioni, it is visually striking climaxes that seem to offer a summation of the film preceding them: in particular the camera that circles the room and then appears to push through the barred window at the end of The Passenger; the consumerist/architectural apocalypse sound tracked to a Pink Floyd instrumental freak-out at the end of Zabriskie Point; and, most achingly and sorrowfully, the emptiness and absence of human warmth that fill the closing moments of L’Eclisse. In Identification, Antonioni creates a pair of matching sequences in the film’s two halves, one involving each lover, that explicitly comment on Nicollo’s power or lack thereof and yet lend themselves well to a simple, perhaps intentional pun.
Following the scene described in the paragraph before last, a ten-minute sequence unfolds in which Nicollo and Mavi find themselves literally lost in a fog on their way to the country. I am not certain if it has any grounds in meteorological phenomena in Italy, but Antonioni gives it the feel of both an impressive studio set piece (though it may be on location) and an otherworldly exploration. Each takes turns descending into the fog, looking, perhaps for some answer to guide them out of their predicament. This trip marks the beginning of the disintegration of the pair’s relationship and if it doesn’t necessarily capture the height of Nicollo’s paranoia that he is being followed, it does reflect the romantic suffocation of being in close quarters with someone whom you can no longer stand.
Near the end of the film, Nicollo and Ida are in an area he refers to as the “open lagoon” off the coast of Venice, literally out to sea in a rowboat on calm waters. Again, this must be location shooting, but Carlo Di Palma’s cinematography (significantly less “showy” throughout than in past Antonioni works, even ones he had also shot) gives the tranquil body of water an air of such artificiality as it extends to a bright plastic horizon that I almost expect to see Truman Burbank wading knee-deep through the sound stage on a search for the exit door. Here, the lovers’ conversation is more profound and probing, leaving the door open for a “happy” ending, with which the penultimate sequence wrenchingly disposes.
Antonioni probes depth of eroticism and sexual explicitness with the insight which one would imagine a septuagenarian might have obtained but avoids wandering over into the provenance of the “dirty old man.” As the film is split in two between the two relationships, so is Nicollo’s physicality and intimacy with the two women. All three of the sex scenes occur in the first half, involving Nicollo and Mavi and fairly convincingly simulated oral sex, fisting and uninhibited bare-assed intercourse. The cut from the last of these sessions to the point in the future where Nicollo abruptly discovers Mavi has vanished from his life is the most emotionally jarring in the film.
By contrast, Nicollo’s physical relationship with Ida is expressed through passionate kisses, extended embraces and hand-holding and a less “idealized” expression of the female body: the only time we see Ida naked (fully) is as she is talking to Nicollo while on the toilet, wiping herself. I don’t take the absence of the sex act in the Ida portion of Identification to mean that they aren’t having any, or to set up some false madonna/whore dichotomy, but to suggest, by shorthand, that Ida is providing him with something Mavi couldn’t, even as he remains “obsessed” (Tomas Milian’s restrained and occasionally one-note performance never quite suggests an adequate amount of obsession to accompany the demands of the plot. He seems appropriately weary, though).
Antonioni keeps a fair amount of ambiguity throughout - Is Nicollo vindicated in his suspicions of Mavi’s faithlessness? Like the protagonist of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, he seems tormented by the not improbable possibility that his beloved prefers relations with women to men - but sacrifices a lot of this for an honest and blunt dialogue between Nicollo and Ida at the end, after she receives some unexpected news. Too much is taken for granted, I think, in this conversation. The same turn of events could have been handled with a lot less dialogue to achieve a similar emotional pull on the audience. We may already suspect how Nicollo might react, but having the both of them speculate on it renders the moment inert.
The final minutes suggest that Antonioni may want us to consider human sexual and emotional entanglements to be as fantastical as a sci-fi tale requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief. The parting image is visually stimulating and yet suggests the leap to a certain naïveté that I can’t quite force myself to enact. Accompanied by pieces of melancholic piano music in some moments, and an early ‘80s new wave score courtesy of Tangerine Dream, Japan, XTC, and OMD among others, Identification of a Woman ultimately feels like Antonioni’s stab at an ‘80s romantic comedy - if you substitute ennui for romantic and controlled bemusement for comedy.
It doesn’t become a parody of his style as I imagine his detractors would and may have held forth, but even the second time through it doesn’t enrapture me like some of his works do. And if I can’t buy into its sci-fi trappings (metaphorical or otherwise) viewing it for the first time on the 30th anniversary of its theatrical release, the 15th of its official American engagement, and the first of its DVD release, feels enough like time travel of a sort to allow me some empathy, and not a little interest, for the nature of his experiment.