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).
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.
