First the good. The fog scene. OMG. Incredible. Even if you decide to skip this movie, you should try to find that scene and watch it. Next the bad: ouch dude my brain hurts.
"Identification of a Woman" was the last feature film by master director Michelangelo Antonioni before he suffered a debilitating stroke and lost his ability to communicate. It was also his long-awaited, eagerly-anticipated salivatorily-received return to the cinema of his native Italy after some 15 years making films in the UK & USA. This is a landmark for the fans, and as far as that goes I am... how does one say "fanboi" in Italian?
But wow, this is a difficult film.
Although the story is easy enough to follow (a director searches for the perfect female character for his latest movie whilst personally going through several women in his life), the plot is not the main focus of the movie. Rather, the main focus is on Antonioni's style of storytelling which has always been cryptic and deliberately confounding.
In this case it can be outright frustrating or even infuriating. This is because, unlike Antonioni's earlier Italian works that you probably love him for ("L'avventura", "La notte", "L'eclisse", "Red Desert"), here of course we don't have the wonderfully human Monica Vitti or any of the other interesting characters such as L;eclisse's boy-faced charmer Alain Delon or Red Desert's broodingly introspective Richard Harris. Here the characters are all deliberately wooden personifications of social tiers and personality types. While, yes, that successfully shifts focus to the theme of the film, it makes for a difficult movie watching experience.
Further complicating the experience are some explicit sexual scenes which can be disturbing to watch (a scene of a man aggressively pleasuring a woman with his hand, leaving nothing to the imagination) which was undoubtedly Antonioni's deliberate embracing of the new sexually explicit cinematic style of the 80s. Indeed, a prominent theme in many of his works is that new ways must be forcefully embraced even at the expense of losing our traditions.
So it all fits with what he's saying here. I won't argue with his presentation. I'll just say, wow that was difficult. Other reviewers have noted that you really have to watch this film twice. I'm sure I'll give it another go soon enough. I just need to rest my brain first.
