[In the following review, eleven years after Identification of a Woman premiered, Brown calls the film “beautifully made … bewitching and exhilarating.”]

Antonioni’s last feature, Identification of a Woman, played in the 1982 New York Film Festival but got hostile reviews and never, as far as I know, opened for a theatrical run. I remember the totally dismissive tenor of the notices—they made the movie sound impenetrable and interminable. I assumed I hadn’t missed much. Now a warped and beat-up print arrives for just one weekend of the Public’s summer Italian festival, and I see that we missed something very special. Continuing in the vein of L’avventura and Blow-Up. Antonioni made a beautiful, riveting, very personal film, which reminds me of Vertigo and of a film made around the same time,’ Nostalghia (actually, Tonino Guerra, a collaborator on Antonioni’s screenplay, worked on the Tarkovsky picture).

Maybe it has partly to do with that lean, ascetic, academic visage, but Antonioni has always passed as an intellectual, and he’s probably mentioned (disparagingly) more than anyone else as singlehandedly responsible for some terminally arty cinema of ideas. The truth is that he’s really as compulsive and directly instinctive an artist as, say, Hitchcock, who’s usually placed at an opposite pole. The trouble with and beauty of Antonioni’s films is precisely that they don’t reside in ideas; reduced to ideas (if a catchword like “alienation” can be called an idea), they really are boring.

It’s probably safe to say that Antonioni personally suffers, or once suffered, a radical estrangement from the world of others, and that “reality” for him is a personal construct, an improvisation. All of his movies are based on some central, unsolvable mystery. Why did a woman commit suicide? What caused another to walk away one day without a trace? At a lower, basement level, a profounder doubt kicks in. Not who was killed in the park and why, but was anyone killed at all Corpses in Antonioni are rarely found. Bodies have their own logic.

In Identification of a Woman, the threatening forces are Other People, particularly the Very Rich—the class that always attracts/repels Antonioni (as it does many another political Socialist). At a party for aristocrats and such, Niccolo (Tomas Milian) is so disoriented he mistakes a woman’s bracelet for an ashtray. Today, the film seems prescient about the prevalence of corruption in Italy, the economic narcissism: “Once it was the poor who left the country. Now, these people do.”

Like Godard, Antonioni starts by quoting from American detective movies; whatever else they may be, his protagonists are usually amateur private eyes. Here the nod comes right off when Niccolo, a filmmaker between films, gets a call, ostensibly from someone’s “gorilla,” or gunsel, warning him to stay away from Mavi, a woman he’s seeing. Throughout, there’re all sorts of hints that he and/or Mavi (the dramatic Daniela Silverio) are under surveillance—then again, they may not be. (A local enigma here is whether there is or isn’t some sort of listening or video device in the tree outside his window.) Eventually, Mavi disappears and Niccolo himself turns tracker and watcher.

The title sounds like something to do with identifying a female body. But where’s the body? As in Vertigo, the woman evades a man’s private obsession, his projections—except that here there’s no victim; the lady’s not for identifying.

If Antonioni’s idealizations of women, his notions of their connections with universal truth or indigenous angst, began to grate around the time of Red Desert, Identification, signals Antonioni’s recognition that he never knew women at all. Here women even look, like boys and turn to other women for sex—though one prefers riding horses. (The movie offers a couple of eye-popping sex scenes.)

The nominal plot has something to do with a director (another of Antonioni’s artist heroes) seeking a woman—in the newspapers, in the zeitgeist, in the women he meets—to structure his new film around. In the past, of course, Antonioni has always used women’s stories. But here Niccolo can’t find woman or story. Extraordinary women appear but it’s his own impoverished sensibility, his bafflement, that serves as point of view. It takes his sister, a gynecologist, to lead him to Mavi; after Mavi (who begins to look like an aviatrix) disappears (à la Amelia Earhart?), an old girlfriend discovers the enchanting Ida (Christine Boisson). Mavi and Ida (two terrific-looking women) are united by secrets concerning paternity—a symmetry that renders each inaccessible. Or so Niccolo believes.

Identification frustrates those who fancy a firm, hand-holding plot and who need to distinguish flashback from present tense. Its real power is hidden deep in the language of image. Take the sensual promise of the opening sequence: The enigma of a tiled wall that turns into a patterned floor leading to the first of the movie’s spiral staircases. At the top our hero (the word is used loosely) slips his moorings, and encounters remnants of his ex-wife’s fears (fears he never understood and certainly did nothing to alleviate).

Nothing, much less a woman, gets positively identified in Identification. Yet the journey is bewitching and exhilarating, and all the more moving for having been lost to us for the past 11 years.