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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.

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