Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen L'AVVENTURA II AN UNADVENTUROUS ANTONIONI MOST artists spend their entire careers in the elaboration of a single theme or idea. Once in a century, perhaps, there is a genius like Picasso...
...In L'Avventura , the barren island on which the disappearance of the first woman occurs has its own counterpart, its doppelganger, in a deserted town to which the man comes later with the second woman...
...The atmosphere becomes an emblem of the human relationship it engulfs...
...The incident precipitates a fight between him and Mavi that almost ends their relationship right there...
...But his break-through was to turn Neo-Realism toward surrealism in movies...
...Again, a man searching for the woman finds instead another one who replaces the first in his life...
...He didn't want to repeat himself just for money and fame...
...Ardent readers of this column will be surprised to see me having such regrets about the most recent work of Michelangelo Antonioni, a filmmaker whom I was praising just last year for his ability to remain daring, inventive, original...
...That kind of achievement comes but once in a lifetime...
...After the brilliant early success of "Nude Descending a Staircase," Duchamp quit painting...
...This fog re-appears, so to speak, when he takes the second woman, Ida (Boisson), out on the open lagoon at Venice...
...He has to get out of the car and go ahead on foot to find his turning, and then he has trouble locating the car itself again...
...The lagoon is a place that seems, like the fog, both boundless and claustrophobic at the same time...
...Nonetheless, it is always a bit sad to see an artist decline into superficial repetitions of earlier triumphs - into being one of his own imitators, a mere echo of his former self...
...Daniela Silverio and Christine Boisson, the actresses who play the two roles in Identification, even look alike...
...The parallel between the fog and the lagoon remains, painfully, a mere contrivance...
...The film he sent to the Festival this year may be more successful, but at the cost of also being safer, less adventurous, less original...
...Without sacrificing the cold objectivity of the Neo-Realists, he found ways to get at isolated consciousness, ineffable mysteries, the metaphysics of the self...
...Doing so gave to his filmmaking then an exhilaration that can, it's sad to say, never be recaptured...
...The film turns her from a presence into an animus...
...In the earlier film, there is a moment when the man actually mistakes the second woman for the first, and in the new film something similar happens...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...In Identification, the man, a film director named Niccolo (Tomas Milian), also finds himself in different settings that resemble each other as eerily as the two different women he brings to them...
...This reinforces our sense of the physical continuity, and symbolic parallel, between them...
...I felt once more in Oberwald the heat of experimentation...
...In L'Avventura, it's as if the' woman who disappears is transformed not just into another woman, but into an entire landscape and a sequence of events...
...He spent much of the rest of his life playing chess...
...Antonioni came into filmmaking during the formative stages of Neo-Realism, and his early work - such as the mid-1940s documentary Gente del Po - was done in that tradition...
...And yet something is lacking, some compulsion in Antonioni, some spirit of necessity in the film itself...
...Identification of a Woman is very much a re-make of L'Av-ventura...
...Identification lacks the excitement of discovering the medium that L'Avventura had...
...We can't ordinarily expect that kind of self-honesty and self-discipline, even from geniuses...
...She is not missing so much as diffused through the actions of others and the countryside they inhabit...
...Precisely at the moment that Identification attempts to become magical like this, it fails...
...The work he showed then at the New York Film Festival, The Mystery of Oberwald, was a use of video as imaginative in its way as his use of film had been twenty years earlier in L'Avventura...
...At one point when he is driving the first woman, Mavi (Silverio), to a weekend in the country, they are marooned in a fog on a highway...
...The scene in the latter setting is awkward and pretentious...
...Here, as in L'Avventura, Antonioni plays out in his story and its settings the parallel between the women...
...Antonioni was again searching out the possibilities of a medium, risking failure, and sometimes achieving it, in order to remain innovative...
...Like Antonioni's 1960 classic, the new movie was written in collaboration with Tonino Guerra and is about the disappearance of a woman...
...The intelligence that was at work twenty years ago is much in evidence in this film, too...
...Once in a century, perhaps, there is a genius like Picasso capable of re-inventing himself again and again...
...Rarer still is the artist like Marcel Duchamp, who could admit to himself that moments of true originality come but once in a lifetime...
...Antonioni was not just exploring the aesthetic possibilities of film, but creating new ones, taking the medium in a whole new direction...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
