Cast: Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Marcel Bozzuffi, Lara Wendel
128' - Colour - 35mm - 1981 - S/T
Hailed as "perhaps Antonioni's most beautiful film to date" (Time Out), and as "Antonioni's most overtly erotic film ... the work of a great director" (David Thomson), this chic psychological thriller wasn't released in North America for over a decade, and received its belated Vancouver premiere at Pacific Cinémathèque in 1996. Thomas Milian has the lead as a 40-year-old filmmaker searching for the "ideal woman" on two fronts: an actress for his latest film project, and a lover to replace the wife he has recently divorced. His troubled relationships with a young stage actress (Christine Boisson) and a bisexual aristocrat (Daniela Silverio) provide the stuff of a startlingly sexy, characteristically enigmatic Antonioni inquiry into the problems of intimacy and identity in the modern world, rendered with all the breathtaking visual bravura, metaphysical mystery, and self-referential style of a great modernist master, and leading to a cosmic conclusion.
Identification of a Woman was awarded the 35th Anniversary Prize at Cannes in 1982, and was a huge box-office hit in Italy .
"A brilliant, glittering piece of filmmaking ... a stunningly beautiful film" - Nick Roddick, Sight and Sound