Identification of a Woman

Michelangelo Antonioni's Identification of a Woman is a late work, made when the director was about 70 years old.  As is the case with many autumnal works, the film is nakedly confessional -- Antonioni exposes aspects of his personality that may be better off concealed.  The picture's self-indulgence crystallizes features implicit in his earlier, far better films and, I think, casts a disturbing light on his apparent misogyny -- in L'Avventura, Antonioni posits that one woman may be substituted for another, at least as far as their relationship with pampered and handsome upper-class Italian men is concerned.  L'Avventura poses this proposition as a metaphysical axiom -- our lives are as often more driven by absences, by what we think we have lost or misplaced, than by those who are present to us.  Identification of a Woman recasts these ideas in explicitly sexual terms that also seem autobiographical in an embarrassing way.  The embarrassment arises in the sense that Antonioni seems strangely indifferent to,  or even indulgent with respect to, the flaws in his narcissistic protagonist.

Nicolo Farra is a film maker at a loss for ideas for his next picture.  (The situation is similar to the much greater 8 1/2 -- even down the science fiction themes.  Fellini's sexism is so extreme that it goes over-the-top into a weirdly ingratiating surreal spectacle -- the director is actually shown taking a whip to tame the various tiger-like women competing for him.  Antonioni is more refined and, therefore, oddly more reprehensible.  Fellini admires all sorts of women, all shapes, sizes, and ages, and, although he views them as exotic beasts there is nonetheless a sense of genuine affection in his films.  By contrast, Antonioni seems obsessed with a particular type of insolent teenager, slim-bodied, elegant, and mostly impassive --and,, one can not ignore the age differential, a disturbing aspect of Identification).  Farra has just been divorced and needs a new woman in his life.  He exploits his sister, a gynecologist, to seduce one of her patients, a hard-faced little tart (who is also some kind of aristocrat) named Maria Victoria or Mavi.  Mavi has apparently just had an abortion, presumably accomplished by Farra's sister, and, in fact, isn't supposed to have sex.  Be that as it may, Farra and Mavi are shown in bed in several explicit scenes that, apparently, offended people in 1982 when the movie was released -- a typical episode of Lena Dunham's Girls has far more sex displayed in more clinical and equally explicit imagery.  Mavi takes Farra to a party where various nobility parade around, people who all seem shell-shocked at their own ill-deserved wealth.  Farra has been threatened by a rather feckless thug to stay away from Mavi.  Who is Mavi's protector?  It's a mystery that the film poses but never bothers to solve.  Since Farra isn't deterred by the thug and since the bad guy doesn't even threaten any more than disrupting the movie-makers "peace of mind", this entire sub-plot goes nowhere and, in effect, seems just a bow toward those critics who expect an Antonioni film to be lavish with inexplicable enigma.  Farra and Mavi don't really get along too well -- he calls her a "shark".  When the thug starts tailing them, they flee into the country.  Along the way, fog drowns he highway and they are becalmed in an ocean of suffocating pinkish mist -- this leads to another big fight, triggered by Farra's absurd decision to leave Mavi in the car parked on the highway (and, therefore, exposed to other traffic blundering around).  The last thing you want to do in fog of this sort is get out of your car and stroll around on the highway -- but that's what these Italians do.  Escaping the highly allegorical fog, the couple reach a highly allegorical villa in the country -- the place is collapsing into a Roman ruin built on the same site.  There's a jump-scare when an owl flies out of the ruins and the couple continue quarreling with Mavi echoing Claudia's demand from L'Avventura -- "tell me that you love me."  Farra can't utter the words and so the couple breaks up.  In a nasty interlude, Farra tries to hustle a teenage girl watching swimmers.  Ostensibly, he is casting for his movie, seeking the "perfect face", but he has no plot, no funding, a co-writer who is skeptical about the whole  project and, so, his machinations among the fairer sex seem really just be a dating and seduction scheme.  The teenage girl, another of the film's "shark-like" females with hard, masculine features, says that when she and her girlfriend where abandoned by boyfriends who went to watch a boxing match, they engaged in mutual masturbation.  This is idiotic -- no teenage girl in the history of the world has ever done something like this -- or, if she did, wouldn't blurt this out to a male stranger thirty years older than her.  Furthermore, it's an unsettling insight in Antonioni's own fantasy world.  Farra then meets his ex-wife who is skeptical about his new project.  (After all, the face that Farra is seeking is imaged on his wall by a glossy picture of Louise Brooks -- good luck finding someone who looks like her!)  Farra,then, meets a comely actress and dancer who obligingly hops into bed with him.  There's some more explicit sex, hot for 1982 -- this girl is supposed to be the opposite of Mavi, Farra's previous girlfriend whom he is, more or less, stalking.  But this effect is destroyed by Antonioni casting almost the exact same physical and facial type as Mavi for this role -- Antonioni likes a certain type of actress and he obsessively casts women who look, more or less, alike for roles that are supposed to be totally different.  The new girlfriend also has a hard, mask-like face, a lithe boyish body, and she inexplicably talks dirty from time to time as well -- she's aroused by riding her pony and admits the same to Farra.  (All of this is utterly implausible.)  Ida is so accommodating that she helps Farra find Mavi's new address.  He stalks her there.  By this time, Mavi' has figured-out that Farra is useless in all respects and, very rationally, wants nothing to do with him -- although the sadness of eschewing Farra's embraces does cause her to tear-up.  Farra takes Ida to the "open lagoon", a void of pinkish sea and pinkish sky somewhere near Venice.  It's the highly allegorical and symbolic equivalent of the fog in which Mavi and Farra got lost and had their first big squabble.  Back at the hotel, Ida confesses that she is pregnant and that the child is, apparently, not Farra's.  Farra, then, predictably dumps her, coldly and efficiently.  He goes back to  his bachelor pad and starts scripting a movie about astronauts flying into the sun.  Needless to say, the sun is portrayed as a sort of reddish womb.  Apparently, staring too long at a certain kind of woman causes blindness -- or, at least, burns the observer.  And that's how the film ends. 

The picture isn't badly made and has some nice landscapes.  The acting is okay in a nihilistic sort of way.  The film's greatest flaw, other than its foolish concept, is Farra -- the actor is handsome but stiff and it's somewhat inexplicable that all of these beautiful woman would desire him.  Of course, he's supposed to represent Antonioni, although twenty years younger, and I suppose the message of the picture is that all women lust after the Byronic handsome loner.  It's possible, I suppose, to read the film as some kind of ironic commentary and satire on a certain kind of Italian man -- but the film seems too unaware, too unself-conscious as to its own subject matter for that interpretation to be valid.  Antonioni edited the picture and it may be worth watching for the numerous cuts that are intended to disorient the viewer -- the film is a textbook example of ways to edit a movie to create a sense of alienation.  Often, the cuts seem to make no sense, but I think they are all consciously contrived to be worrisome to the viewer -- like Farra lost in the fog or afloat on the "open lagoon", we don't know exactly where we are or why we have come to this pass.