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“It ‘s like when I look to the solution for a film’s plot and I can’t find it.”

DVD Spine # 585

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was 70 the year his autumnal “anti-romance” Identification of a Woman was released in 1982. Although he remained alive for another quarter-century, and received an Honorary Oscar in 1995 (he had been nominated twice in 1967 for co-writing and directing his English language debut Blow-Up), he would only direct one more feature film, one-third of an omnibus film and several shorts and visual essays. A massive stroke he suffered in 1985 was partially to blame but the greater hindrance was an inability to be insured by the guaranty companies that cover film productions.

Wim Wenders’ involvement/presence on the set of 1995’s Beyond the Clouds (he is listed as co-director) helped to get that film - one of Antonioni’s I still have not seen - through to completion in the same way that Paul Thomas Anderson was a “back-up” or “stand-by” director on Robert Altman’s final feature A Prairie Home Companion. There is a cruel irony inherent in a man whose films deal directly and sometimes exclusively with inabilities or failures of communication to find himself “silenced,” at least in the film world, first in a physical sense (though he did regain a good portion of what he lost), and later from a financial one.

Identification of a Woman was the director’s fifth and final time competing for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and ended up winning a Special Jury Prize handed out in honor of Cannes’ 35th anniversary that year. He had previously been nominated for 1975’s The Passenger, won for Blow-Up, and received Jury Prizes as well for 1962’s L’Eclisse and 1960’s L’avventura. I only note this reception prior to and including this week’s film to indicate my astonishment that it did not end up officially opening in the United States until 1996. IMDb and an essay I recently read in one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s compilations both attest to the fact that early bad reviews from the New York critics’ contingent after it played at that year’s New York Film Festival led to its being dropped by its U.S. distributor.

As I mentioned in my first Sole Criterion column back in December, my hope was to push myself farther out with my choices, reaching out to films I had never heard of by directors I didn’t even know existed. This week is another step in that direction. I have been aware of Antonioni since I was a boy and the title Identification of a Woman for a while but until I rented the DVD from the library a few weeks ago, I had never seen any description of plot. I have held off for the time being reading any essays or thoughts on the film in order to formulate my own thoughts first-hand.

And, though it shames me to say this, I took the almost unheard-of for me measure of watching it a second time, pausing it throughout, and taking notes. I have been writing about films for over two decades and doing it (ridiculously) without making observations that I could consult then or, heaven forbid, at some as yet unspecified point in the future. I don’t feel that that is any rational way to deal with films I have never encountered or been prepped for with adverts, criticism, or film blog discussions. So I now proceed.

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