585 Identification of a Woman

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Jeff
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585 Identification of a Woman

#1 Post by Jeff » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:15 pm

Identification of a Woman

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Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds himself drawn into affairs with two enigmatic women, while at the same time searching for the right subject (and actress) for his next film. This spellbinding anti-romance was a late-career coup for the legendary Italian filmmaker, and is renowned for its sexual explicitness and an extended scene on a fog- enshrouded highway that stands with the director’s greatest set pieces.

- New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- Theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic John Powers and a reprinted 1982 interview with Michelangelo Antonioni by critic Gideon Bachmann

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domino harvey
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#2 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:18 pm

They could literally find no scholars or talking heads to contribute anything to the actual disc itself? Or they never looked in the first place... #-o

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#3 Post by matrixschmatrix » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:20 pm

Well, they did price it like an Essential Art House disc, maybe they just couldn't find anything interesting enough to warrant charging for it.

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Jeff
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#4 Post by Jeff » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:34 pm

Yeah, with their $20/$30 price points, I suspect that this and The Makioka Sisters are just the evolution of the Essential Arthouse line for the Blu-ray era. Like that line, I expect that the alternative to these releases is not a fully-loaded set, but no release at all. Just think, at the next BN sale, you'll be able to pick up this Blu-ray for $13.

I wish they'd revisit Kapò with a Blu-ray version.

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dad1153
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#5 Post by dad1153 » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:57 pm

If this is the evolution of the Essential Arthouse Line then bring it on, at least we're getting a reasonably-priced BD option.

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Tom Hagen
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#6 Post by Tom Hagen » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:58 pm

I wish they'd revisit Something Wild, Insignificance, and Black Moon at this price point.

Perkins Cobb
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#7 Post by Perkins Cobb » Fri Jul 15, 2011 4:17 pm

I know nothing about the rights, but I was hoping Mystery of Oberwald might turn up on this disc.

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Gropius
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#8 Post by Gropius » Fri Jul 15, 2011 4:30 pm

Speaking as a great Antonioni fan, this one struck me as a very minor film.

oh yeah
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#9 Post by oh yeah » Fri Jul 15, 2011 6:22 pm

It struck me as fairly minor too compared to Antonioni's earlier work, but I've been meaning to watch it again. Very happy about this news... despite the bare-bones package.

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lubitsch
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#10 Post by lubitsch » Fri Jul 15, 2011 6:39 pm

Gropius wrote:Speaking as a great Antonioni fan, this one struck me as a very minor film.
Speaking as somebody who has to be forced at gunpoint to watch Antonioni's films from 1960 onward, Identification struck me as even more unwatchable than the rest. A lead actor with zero acting ability, an aimless script with bad special effects, two women appearing and disappearing, pointless fog scenes and mysterious events ... oy.
I wish Criterion would pour their resources into good films not into completing the catalogues of great masters regardless of how bad each single film may be.

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knives
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#11 Post by knives » Fri Jul 15, 2011 7:31 pm

I'm watching it right now and enjoy it. While I still prefer the '50s work I've seen there is a much more universal feeling to the film so that it doesn't feel like it only works for it's era. That might lose some truth in a few years when the '80s become a distinct memory, but for now it seems like all of the good with none of the bad.

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Alan Smithee
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#12 Post by Alan Smithee » Fri Jul 15, 2011 8:24 pm

Gropius wrote:Speaking as a great Antonioni fan, this one struck me as a very minor film.
It is kind of a minor film. But Antonioni has made major major films and putting a minor work in the criterion cannon alongside his better work gives us a chance to see his career more clearly. In this case it's probably antonionis last good film, what better image to put on the cover than a filmmaker walking into the fog.
I like when they give us smaller overlooked stuff like this or insignificance. I'd like a minor film month. Brewster McCloud, nostalghia, nouvelle vague, the serpents egg and the hot spot all at once.

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domino harvey
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#13 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jul 15, 2011 8:30 pm

In what world is Godard's Nouvelle Vague "minor"?!

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tarpilot
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#14 Post by tarpilot » Fri Jul 15, 2011 8:37 pm

Brewster McCloud is one of Altman's greatest films. But then, I would take That Cold Day in the Park, A Perfect Couple, and Popeye in half a fucking heartbeat over MASH, Gosford Park, or The Player

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Alan Smithee
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#15 Post by Alan Smithee » Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:11 pm

That's my point none of the works are minor just when you compare them to the CLASSICS or depending on who you're talking to that's what they are considered. I'll personally take N.V. over a woman is a woman any day and I'll take Brewster McCloud over many many Altman films(don't forget it was critical flop) Likewise I'll take Nostalghia over Ivans Childhood.

And let me just add that there's a reason In Praise of Love is covered in "a return to form!" blurbs, there's a large critical segment that wrote Godard off for thirty years. Criterion could do a whole year of "minor Godard".

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SpiderBaby
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#16 Post by SpiderBaby » Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:59 pm

Alan Smithee wrote:I'd like a minor film month. Brewster McCloud, nostalghia, nouvelle vague, the serpents egg and the hot spot all at once.
Hopper's The Hot Spot? That would be cool, but I would think Out of the Blue would be a strong one, with the new print out now.

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tarpilot
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#17 Post by tarpilot » Fri Jul 15, 2011 10:11 pm

Alan Smithee wrote:And let me just add that there's a reason In Praise of Love is covered in "a return to form!" blurbs, there's a large critical segment that wrote Godard off for thirty years. Criterion could do a whole year of "minor Godard".
But c'mon, anyone who dismisses Godard's post-60s work out of hand quite obviously doesn't have an opinion worth considering.

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Alan Smithee
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#18 Post by Alan Smithee » Fri Jul 15, 2011 10:20 pm

Yeah I'm rambling. Sorry. I guess to go back on topic I like I.o.a.W. more than really early and really late Antonioni. It's minor but not unworthy and besides Leningrad Cowboys the most interesting selection to me. I love the classics but I prefer when criterion really surprises me.

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Tommaso
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#19 Post by Tommaso » Sat Jul 16, 2011 7:03 am

Kinda surprised, was this hinted at before? Anyhow, a very nice surprise in my view. Sure, it's minor Antonioni, and an inclusion of "Oberwald" might have made the package more attractive, but if they managed to get rid of the audio problem on the Mr.Bongo disc (a constant buzz plagueing the second half of the film) I'll surely double dip.

It's a bit shallow, but it has style, and all the great NewWave bands on the soundtrack (anything from Japan to John Foxx) are cause enough for me to like the film.

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Der Spieler
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#20 Post by Der Spieler » Sat Jul 16, 2011 7:40 pm

Tommaso wrote: It's a bit shallow, but it has style
I feel that way about most Antonioni's. Color me stupid.

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knives
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#21 Post by knives » Sat Jul 16, 2011 7:50 pm

Yeah, I don't find Anonioni to be a particularly meaningful or deep director, but the way he chronicles what he sees interests me. It's a neat little newspaper with the benefit of that amazing style (though for some reason I can't even detect that style in L'Avventura).

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Tommaso
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#22 Post by Tommaso » Sun Jul 17, 2011 7:48 am

knives wrote:It's a neat little newspaper with the benefit of that amazing style (though for some reason I can't even detect that style in L'Avventura).
There are of course different forms of 'style' in Antonioni. To take your newspaper comparison, "Identification of a woman" probably looks like a rather glossy fashion magazine compared to "L'eclisse"'s philosophy bulletin. But occasionally I like fashion magazines...

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ellipsis7
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#23 Post by ellipsis7 » Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:26 pm

This is great news... IDENTIFICAZIONE is one of Antonioni's most elusive movies, hence very fascinating, and also one of his most direct in exploration of sexuality and the female form, a gaze that sometimes verges on the all too intense... Shorn of extras, this is a wisely packaged release, over interpretation and analysis should not preface the experience of viewing... Looking forward immensely to October, and also hoping L'AVVENTURA & L'ECLISSE will make it soon to BR, and LA NOTTE may emerge out of limbo too to take its place in the CC...

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Sloper
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#24 Post by Sloper » Sun Jul 17, 2011 6:08 pm

I love this film - I can understand why people consider it a 'minor' work, but for me it's a lot better than The Passenger, and about on a par with all of his 1950s films. More importantly, I find it his most emotionally affecting work. I have to disagree with Tommaso that it's glossy and shallow; if anything, I would say that things like L'Eclisse and La Notte have far more in the way of surface charms and overt 'style' (which isn't to say that they're superficial, of course). They're the work of a director in his prime, with total confidence in his control of the medium, whereas The Passenger is, I think, an embarrassingly hesitant attempt to break new ground. I haven't seen Oberwald, of course, but certainly Identification of a Woman is the product of a hard-won artistic maturity, combining confidence with an uncompromising awareness of the artist's limitations, to produce something that in some ways is actually a greater (because humbler) work of art than the more towering masterpieces of the '60s.

I love it because it's so melancholy and rueful - quite self-pitying at times, but resolving and concluding in the cold hard stare Antonioni always directs at those abysses of human misery that only he seems able to describe. In this respect, it reminds me a lot of my favourite short story, Henry James' The Lesson of the Master. It shares James' concern with the toll artistic endeavour can take on the artist's ability to interact with the world, and with other people, but also his philosophical attitude towards the 'impotence' of the artist.

As you would expect from Antonioni, the film has a carefully controlled colour scheme. In the opening shot, a pale grey-blue (a sort of twilight colour, appropriately enough) dominates, accompanied by the brown of the doormat; the green and yellow of the title, and the faded red of Niccolo's briefcase, introduce the other important colours. The whole film has this pale, sickly look about it, which is no doubt why Tomas Milian was cast in the leading role. He looks terrible - drawn and grey, with these hangdog eyes that seem in a permanent state of sad, wry detachment from everything they look at. He wears a pea-soup-green coat, a grey jacket and brown trousers. A couple of times we see him in a red tie or a red shirt, and those are occasions when he's trying to act like he belongs among Mavi's upper-class friends, or like he's young enough to be going out with Ida. Mavi, on the other hand, appears several times in vibrant blue or red, and I think the last time we see Ida she's dressed all in virginal white. It would be a mistake to try and map this colour scheme onto the film too rigidly, but for the most part bright colours are conspicuous by their absence, and this expresses very powerfully the central point: Niccolo is afflicted with a 'maladia' (as he describes the impulse that makes him take Ida out to the open lagoon in Venice), a more personal manifestation of the 'sick eros' Antonioni explored in earlier films. The symptom of this illness, as he says on the lagoon, is his constant reaching out for stimulation, and the sad but beautiful expanse of water embodies his resulting solitude.

The woman at the swimming pool tells him she doesn't like sex with men, because they're always trying to bolster their virility. It turns out she and Mavi were drawn to each other while the men were watching boxing on TV. A woman, it seems, is more intent on giving pleasure than on demanding affirmation. It's telling that when we first see Mavi, she is looking at her body in a mirror (as she will look at herself in a mirror when she has sex with Niccolo) and then smiles as she puts her hand into a large, vaginal seashell; I think this is the moment when she calls the gynecologist, but finds herself talking to Niccolo instead, and I guess it's easy enough to read something into the fact that this is how they first meet.

In the sex scenes with Mavi, there's a great emphasis on Niccolo stimulating her, but after her orgasm in one scene he then appears, in the mirror, with a blank expression on his face, completely unresponsive to Mavi's kisses. Maybe he noticed her looking at herself at the moment of climax. The point, I guess, is that he is desperate to be desired, but incapable of really desiring back, of establishing a truly reciprocal relationship - hence his inability ever to say 'ti amo'. The fog he and Mavi get lost in is another symbol of his state of gloomy isolation (notice that he is deaf to the gunshots and church bells the passers-by tell him about).
SpoilerShow
The incident that precipitates Niccolo's break-up with Mavi is his reckless driving in the fog to escape the spies (who may or may not actually be there) set on them by Mavi's lover/father. It's obviously a defining moment for his character, a confused attempt at virility that only emphasises his egotism and obliviousness. After that, he takes Mavi to the old house that's being slowly sucked down by the weak foundations, and it's here that she tells him he will ruin her life. They have what seems to be 'redemptive' sex under the white bedsheets, but they seem to just be horsing around more than anything else, and I hesitate to mention this, but maybe we're supposed to read something into the brief shot of Niccolo's flaccid penis. In any case, the film cuts to the next morning, Mavi has left (to be with another woman, as it turns out, whom she promises not to leave) and the relationship is over.

Niccolo's subsequent meeting with his old friend - whom he likes because of her vibrancy, and the fact that she has escaped the cold urban environment he is trapped in - and his affair with the younger woman are also obvious 'last gasps' of a man going through a mid-life crisis. Neither relationship is depicted as sexualised in the way that the Mavi relationship was. Ida repulses his attempt to fondle her breasts, the only time we see her naked is when she's on the toilet and then getting dressed, and when they kiss the camera looks away at the lagoon. She finally leaves him because another, younger man has impregnated her - a man distinguished from Niccolo in the sense that he is Ida's 'ordine', which Mr Bongo translate as 'order', but I imagine it means something like 'soulmate' (but less sentimental perhaps?), the person she is meant to be with. Ida's relationship with this other man is the very meeting of minds and souls that the cerebral artist Niccolo cannot form with another person.

To me, the ending is kind of the lonely man's apotheosis: the spaceship flying into the sun to learn all about it, but completely impervious to (that is, incapable of being warmed by) its heat, is of course a metaphor for Niccolo's attitude towards love, women, people, the world, the universe and so on; he is obsessed with identifying, recording and analysing these things, but this obsession either prevents him from interacting with them, or is a symptom of his inability to do so. Antonioni's themes always sound trite when I try and put them into words, but the bizarre ending to this film is a wonderfully daring and inventive swan song (not that he would have intended it to be a swan song). Alan Smithee said earlier that the cover image, of a film-maker walking into the fog, is very appropriate, and in a way the spaceship being absorbed by the sun is an alternative to this. It's at once more triumphant and more nihilistic - and with the music playing over it, and the nephew's voice throwing out that unanswered question, 'e dopo?', I find it incredibly moving. Probably a lot of people just think it's silly, but I think that silliness, that lack of concern about what the arthouse crowd will think of this openly childish (that is, regressive, though disguised as progressive) sci-fi fantasy ending, is a crucial part of what makes the ending so great.
I don't really consider Beyond the Clouds or Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo 'real' Antonioni films (I still haven't quite worked up the courage to watch Eros), but it is interesting to consider that, after the resigned despair of Identification of a Woman, this director might have retreated further and further into contemplating stories (and story-telling processes) rather than telling them. This film certainly represents a crucial stage in the progression of Antonioni's approach to his art, and it's a very satisfying 'last film': austere, rambling, sickly, lethargic, contemplative and ultimately very poignant.

There are just two things I don't like about it. First, there are some awkward philosophical exchanges ('If man didn't exist, would God still exist?') reminiscent of The Passenger. Not too many, though, and on the whole I do find almost every frame of this film genuinely profound.

The second problem has already manifested itself a little in this post, [edit - and I see ellipsis has sort of mentioned it too]. I don't think I'm a prude, but this does at times feel like a bit of a dirty old man's film. The way the women are leered over, and some of the things they are required to say ('Bouncing in a saddle excites me'), makes me a bit uncomfortable. That making-of documentary on the Beyond the Clouds disc didn't help - there's a very awkward bit where Antonioni tries to re-position an actress's legs as she lies on a bed, and she is visibly and audibly bothered by this. It's one of those things you wish you could un-see... Of course the sex scenes, the nudity, and all the talk about female sexuality, are integral to the whole point of the film, so I'm not saying they're gratuitous. But they certainly don't have the beauty or resonance of the desert orgy in Zabriskie Point, or the more restrained sex scenes in the earlier films; they feel just a little bit pornographic at times. Rather than feeling like Antonioni has been liberated by the greater permissiveness of the '80s, I find myself missing the subtlety that characterised his prior treatments of sex. I'd be interested to know whether anyone else feels this way, or whether I really am just being prudish.

I haven't noticed the buzz that Tommaso mentions on the Mr Bongo release, but their subtitles are really appalling. My Italian isn't great, but even I can see that they're getting things wrong on countless occasions: as well as typos and bad English, there are obvious mis-translations, missing lines, or just lines that don't make any sense (what the hell was that hang-gliding conversation about? Is he saying that women are silent, like hang-gliders, but he always wants to talk about everything?). I'm so glad Criterion are releasing this film, if only because I look forward to finding out what these characters are really saying.

Robin Davies
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Re: 585 Identification of a Woman

#25 Post by Robin Davies » Mon Jul 18, 2011 3:18 pm

Excellent review. It's refreshing to read a spirited defence of this film. I like it too.
Sloper wrote:I don't think I'm a prude, but this does at times feel like a bit of a dirty old man's film.
I disagree with this. I don't understand why old male directors get criticised for including frank eroticism in their films. Nic Roeg got similar flak over Puffball.
Sloper wrote:That making-of documentary on the Beyond the Clouds disc didn't help - there's a very awkward bit where Antonioni tries to re-position an actress's legs as she lies on a bed, and she is visibly and audibly bothered by this.
It didn't seem like that to me. Fanny Ardant was laughing along with everyone else on the set (including Antonioni's wife).
Sloper wrote:I haven't noticed the buzz that Tommaso mentions on the Mr Bongo release, but their subtitles are really appalling. My Italian isn't great, but even I can see that they're getting things wrong on countless occasions: as well as typos and bad English, there are obvious mis-translations, missing lines, or just lines that don't make any sense
My favourite was the line "Don't make luaves" which I assume should be "Don't make waves"!

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