Identification of a Woman

[Interview] So you think making a fuss bout love is old-fashioned. Let’s say it’s historical. It’s part of other times, of past literature and of past art, past cinema, past theatre… I admit to believing that 19th-century passion today arouses only smiles… Control becomes a habit. A way of life, maybe the only one… [As a consequence,] there is love in the film, but it is a contemporary love, a love of today. A love for which a man who has two disappointments in a row doesn’t tear his hair out, doesn’t despair like one used to. He has a mature capacity for suffering, but he controls and in the end dominates it. He has learned to control his feelings and sentiments, especially within the framework of his craft which has taught him to hold back narrative flights of fancy.

By Gideon Bachmann, 1983

[Review] Michelangelo Antonioni's 1982 feature (he didn't make another until the 1995 Beyond the Clouds) focuses on an Italian filmmaker (Tomas Milian) and his chance encounters with two women. The most openly erotic of Antonioni's features, and visually one of the most beautiful (what he does with fog in one famous sequence is particularly memorable), it's also one of his most elusive in terms of plot and character.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader