Identification of a Woman review – Michelangelo Antonioni’s midlife crisis of a movie | Film
Michelangelo Antonioni’s lengthy slide from vital favour could or is probably not reversed by the re-release of this late work from 1982, a midlife or latelife disaster of a film that Antonioni made on the age of 70 and was his final severe solo directorial work. (I might a lot favor to see a revival of his large and uncared for movie The Woman With out Camelias from 1953.)
Anyway, this revives his signature themes – metaphysical thriller, existential nervousness, sexual obsession – and there are some particular, pleasing thrives. However sadly, as with the later films of Fellini, there are some softcore intercourse scenes and a preposterously romanticised and eroticised seek for the best (and sexually out there) lady; the idea of the sexually stressed middle-aged film-maker auditioning younger ladies to be in his films jars a little bit.
Our hero is Niccolò, performed by Tomas Milian, a film director who’s broodingly between initiatives and creatively blocked. Someday he finds himself on the workplace of his sister, a gynaecologist; she is frantically busy, so he good-naturedly helps out by taking a name from one among her sufferers, an exquisite, aristocratic lady referred to as Maria Vittoria, or “Mavi”, performed by the glacially charismatic Daniela Silverio. Merely attracted by the sound of her voice, he impulsively finds her quantity from his sister’s appointments guide, calls her and so they quickly start a passionate affair. This weird and extremely inappropriate advance may within the arms of one other director be the topic of worldly black comedy. And – who is aware of? – Antonioni possibly meant, at some stage, a type of deadpan comedy in it. However comedy could be the enemy of this movie’s eroticism.
Quickly Niccolò detects hostility amongst Mavi’s patrician family and friends; there are shadowy threats from an nameless goon hanging round within the streets and finally the entrancing Mavi merely disappears, after which Niccolò tries to seek out consolation with one other lady, Ida (Christine Boisson), with whom he has a (stylishly photographed) interval in wintry Venice. However she seems to be pregnant with one other man’s little one and that relationship additionally ends in calamity, leaving Niccolò to ponder his desolate thought for a science-fiction film that includes an asteroid heading inexorably out into house.
Maybe probably the most distinctive scenes are these wherein Niccolò attends a really grand black-tie affair with Mavi, and senses a clean, unreadable hostility amongst all of the grand individuals current. They’ve that very same jaded, eerie ennui to be seen in different Antonioni movies with a celebration scene, and it’s intriguing to distinction them with formal scenes in a Buñuel movie. Buñuel may invite the viewers to step again and savour the surreal absurdity of those ritualistic occasions, whereas Antonioni desires you to step inside and inhale the unwholesome, oppressive ambiance.
Identification of a Girl is a film from which there could not but be fairly sufficient historic perspective to show its datedness into interval attraction. But the strangeness and haunted nervousness is potent.
