Identification of a Woman (1982): Antonioni enters the ’80s, as provocative as ever (Review)

If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Michelangelo Antonioni was a genius, consider this: he made the British overcome their prurience. On its 1966 release, his classic Blow-Up was a substantial hit in the UK among audiences who were not primarily interested in watching the latest film from the director of La Notte and Red Desert. This was because it offered the country its first sight of pubic hair in a theatrically released film. Back then, there were doubtless some who only knew the film for this; today, it’s a piece of pub trivia about a film whose classic status is assured. Identification of a Woman, released in a 2K restoration on Blu-Ray by Cult Films, hasn’t been as fortunate. Today, a lot of British viewers still remember it chiefly as one of the films prefaced by Channel 4’s infamous “Red Triangle”, an intended content warning that was interpreted by many viewers as a promise of something steamy.

Most of the time, these films could only have disappointed an onanistic audience: good luck trying to masturbate to Hector Babenco’s traumatic juvenile delinquency tale Pixote. Identification of a Woman is different, in that it contains sex scenes that are actually aiming for eroticism. This is usually a good way to earn your film a lazy dismissal from the kind of critic who will happily applaud a tear-jerking romance, or a pulse-pounding action scene, but unleashes their inner censor whenever films try to manipulate this particular emotion. This reissue proves, however, that there is much more to Identification of a Woman than its sex scenes, which aren’t even particularly shocking compared to a modern European art-house film or American cable drama. Not Antonioni’s strongest work, but far from his weakest, it proves that even at this late point in his career his films were still full of surprises.

Chief among the surprises in Identification of a Woman is something I never thought I’d see: a subtle, restrained performance from Tomás Milán. The star of the weirdest Django film (Guilio Questi’s Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) proves to be a natural at playing one of Antonioni’s alienated, introverted protagonists. This time the hero is Niccolò, a film director at a dead end in his life. He’s still creatively active – the first time we see him, he’s scribbling down some new ideas for a scene – but his career is at a standstill, he’s full of self-doubt and his only human connection is his sister, a gynaecologist. He begins dating one of his sister’s patients, a brittle aristocrat called Mavi, and when she disappears he finds himself drawn into another of Antonioni’s wilfully unsolvable mysteries.

Identification of a Woman came out two years after Antonioni’s countryman Fellini released City of Women, an attempt to satirise contemporary gender politics that earned him some of the worst reviews of his career. Perhaps people thought Antonioni was offering more of the same, with a self-insert hero drifting from bedroom to bedroom. While the two Italians are alike in genius, though, they are worlds apart in sensibility. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita works so beautifully because he is able to see the sensual pleasure as well as the hollow avarice of its many parties; by contrast, Niccolò looks like he’s having a tooth pulled every time Mavi drags him to another high-society bash. The film can be read as Antonioni’s response to Fellini’s landmark, as well as a work in conversation with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (not yet canonised as the Greatest Film Ever Made at this point). Like Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie, Niccolò unwisely pursues a new relationship while he’s still reeling from the disappearance of his last partner. The scene which announces Identification of a Woman is about to leave the confines of the realistic relationship drama it initially seemed to involve a suffocatingly thick fog, as dense and as mysterious as the Green Fog of Guy Maddin’s 2017 homage to Vertigo.

The fog scene, as bravura a visual metaphor as the unforgettable closing shot of The Passenger, was one which even the film’s harshest critics could appreciate. Perhaps Identification of a Woman‘s other stylistic coups are more obvious in hindsight, because nowadays what strikes you is how quintessentially 1980s it is. The score is by Ultravox’s John Foxx, and there are needle-drops from Japan, Tangerine Dream and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. This defiantly modern, aloof, synthesised music is a natural fit for Antonionian alienation, as is the cinematography by Carlo Di Palma, which contributes to the 1980s neo-noir aesthetic that films like American Gigolo and Thief were only just beginning to map out. The ending of Identification of a Woman even engages with the post-Star Wars turn towards special-effects spectacle, albeit in a way that shrewdly points out that an escapist fantasy of the future is no substitute for being able to imagine an actual, viable future.

Like all Antonioni’s films, Identification of a Woman may not be easy to digest as you watch it, but it’s full of insights and scenes that will lodge in your mind for a long time afterwards. The supplementary material Cult Films have included should help with this process, including a video diary of the shoot, an interview with Antonioni’s widow Enrica (who made her screen debut in this film) and a passionate piece of advocacy for the film by Pasquale Iannone. There’s also a reversible sleeve in case the cover still from one of the film’s sex scenes is a bit too spicy for your shelves. Myself? I didn’t mind either way. Like I said, there really is a lot more to Identification of a Woman than sex scenes.

IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN