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''Identification of a Woman'' () is a 1982 Italian–French
drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...
directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni Michelangelo Antonioni ( ; ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents", ''L'Avventura'' (1960), ''La Notte'' (1961), and '' ...
and starring Tomás Milián, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson. It was awarded the 35th Anniversary Prize at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.


Plot

Niccolò is a film director living in Rome. He has just divorced and lives alone. His only family is his sister, a gynecologist, and her little son. By chance Niccolò gets to know one of his sister's patients, a beautiful young aristocrat called Mavi, and the two start a passionate affair. Niccolò then receives a threat to leave Mavi. He tries to ignore it, but then finds himself under surveillance. He also feels uneasy with her blue blood ties and her former social circles. Then his sister informs him that she, the obvious candidate for the head of the gynecology department, is passed over for the job. Niccolò thinks this is the doing of his shadow blackmailer. Compounded with the 24 hour surveillance daily, the threat proves too hard to bear. He manages to convince Mavi to drive out to an old farmhouse in the country which he rented before, but the drive there through fog is traumatic and they quarrel violently. In the morning Mavi has vanished. Searching for her back in Rome, the only friend of hers who will talk to him warns Niccolò that Mavi is bisexual and hints at a jealous past lover. Wanting company and affection, Niccolò meets a young stage actress called Ida, slim and athletic like Mavi, a working-class girl who loves the country and is not brittle or mysterious but utterly open. While she is happy to sleep with him, she realizes that he is still obsessed with Mavi and with his blackmailer. Ida finds by chance a trail to find Mavi's whereabout. Hiding himself on the stairs beyond her sight, Niccolò hears Mavi tell the girl with whom she shares a flat that she must keep on hiding from him. Accepting at last that Mavi will never come back, he takes Ida for a romantic holiday in Venice. There she gets a phone call from her doctor in Rome, who confirms that she is pregnant. While Ida was ecstatic and wants to keep the baby, Niccolò is not keen on raising a child, especially not someone else's. Back alone in Rome, Niccolò starts musing about his next film. He imagines a spaceship built of asteroid material that could approach the sun. He recalls telling his young nephew about space travel, saying, "The day mankind understands what the sun is made of and its power, perhaps we'll understand the entire universe and the reasons behind so many things." His nephew responds, "And then?"


Cast

* Tomás Milián as Niccolò * Daniela Silverio as Mavi * Christine Boisson as Ida * Lara Wendel as Girl at swimming pool * Veronica Lazar as Carla * Enrica Antonioni as Nadia * Sandra Monteleoni as Mavi's sister * Marcel Bozzuffi as Mario * Giampaolo Saccarola as The gorilla * Arianna De Rosa as Mavi's friend * Dado Ruspoli as Mavi's father * Carlos Alberto Valles as Close-up man * Sergio Tardioli as Butcher * Itaco Nardulli as Lucio * Paola Dominguín as Girl in window


Production and release

''Identification of a Woman'' was shot in Rome and Venice and premiered at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival on 13 May, where it was awarded the 35th Anniversary Prize.


Reception

Initial critical reactions to the film were mixed. To German critic Hans-Christoph Blumenberg (''
Die Zeit (, ) is a German national weekly newspaper published in Hamburg in Germany. The newspaper is generally considered to be among the German newspapers of record and is known for its long and extensive articles. History The first edition of was ...
''), ''Identification of a Woman'' looked as if it had been produced by Italy's consumer goods industry for the sophisticated taste: "so cool, so chique, so expensive". In his 1982 review for the ''
New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'',
Vincent Canby Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who was the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. ...
called the film "an excruciatingly empty work" and "beautiful and sad—virtually a parody of the director's great '' L'Avventura'' and some of his other earlier films." In an October 2011 essay published to accompany a release of a
Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of arthouse film distributo ...
edition, critic John Powers pointed out that the film had been made when Antonioni was nearing seventy: "this is one of those autumnal movies—think '' Rio Bravo'' or '' An Autumn Afternoon''—in which an aging director allows himself to be more relaxed and genial than in his most finely tuned work. Far from serving up a major statement about the
human condition The human condition can be defined as the characteristics and key events of human life, including birth, learning, emotion, aspiration, reason, morality, conflict, and death. This is a very broad topic that has been and continues to be pondered ...
—something Antonioni was never shy about doing—''Identification of a Woman'' comes tinged with modesty and irony. His first feature set in Italy since 1964’s '' Red Desert'', it finds him taking a provisional measure of how the modern world has been shifting around him."


References


External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Identification Of A Woman 1982 films 1980s Italian-language films 1982 drama films Films set in Italy Films about film directors and producers Films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni Films with screenplays by Tonino Guerra Italian drama films French drama films 1980s Italian films 1980s French films