SOURCE: “Identification of a Woman,” in Film Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3, Spring, 1984, pp. 37–43.

In the following essay, Kelly analyzes the moral decadence of Antonioni’s characters in Identification of a Woman.

Speaking of Red Desert, Antonioni once said that it was not a result but research, an apt description which could apply just as accurately to all his subsequent narrative films, until now. In Identification of a Woman, his first Italian film in nearly two decades,¹ Antonioni consolidates and refines the formal and thematic explorations made earlier, blending effortlessly the abstractions of the English-language films with the more intimate milieu and deeper mode of characterization of the Italian films. In addition to drawing from his prior experiments with color, movement, sound, and montage, Antonioni relaxes his strictures on the use of otherwise conventional formal devices by deploying numerous flashbacks and subjective inserts, an abundance of extra-diegetic (“New Wave”) music...