Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian and Christine Boisson in Identification of a Woman

Niccolò: Tomas Milian
Mavi: Daniela Silverio
Ida: Christine Boisson 
Woman in Swimming Pool: Lara Wendel
Carla: Veronica Lazar
Nadia: Enrica Antonioni
Mavi's Sister: Sandra Monteleoni
Mario: Marcel Bozzuffi

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangeo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma
Production design: Andrea Crisanti
Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni
Music: John Foxx

As I said recently about his La Notte (1961), it helps when Michelangelo Antonioni has cast movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in his films because they provide something of a backstory to his often enigmatic characters. Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson, attractive and capable actors though they are, don't do quite enough to illuminate what's going on with Niccolò, Mavi, and Ida in Identification of a Woman. It's a film that plays almost like a parody of the movies that Antonioni and other directors made 20 years earlier: There's a party filled with bored Eurotrash like the ones in La Notte, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1961), and Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1962); there's a film director trying to get over creative block like Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963); there's a search for a missing woman, though not so fruitless as the one in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960); there are some mutterings about imponderable philosophical questions, such as whether god would exist if human beings didn't; and there's a good deal of sex, still not enough to overcome the problems of the characters, though the nudity is more frontal and the copulation more explicit than it was two decades earlier. In short, we've been here before. Still, Identification of a Woman is not without its rewards, most of them provided by the wizardly color cinematography of Carlo Di Palma. His artistry and technique are on display in such scenes as the film's most memorable segment, the journey through the fog, as well as in the play with reflections (see the still above) in the Venetian hotel scene. They do more than the actors do to bring the film to what life it possesses. 

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Carol: Catherine Deneuve
Michael: Ian Hendry
Colin: John Fraser
Helen: Yvonne Furneaux
Landlord: Patrick Wymark
Miss Balch: Renee Houston
Madame Denise: Valerie Taylor
John: James Villiers
Bridget: Helen Fraser
Reggie: Hugh Futcher

Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Roman Polanski, Gérard Brach
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Art direction: Seamus Flannery
Film editing: Alastair McIntyre
Music: Chico Hamilton

Repulsion was only Roman Polanski's second feature film, yet it's the work of a master. It's nothing more than a portrait of a schizophrenic, played by the astonishingly beautiful Catherine Deneuve, and treated with a remarkable detachment. We don't know why Carol Ledoux is mad. A lesser director would have given us flashbacks to Carol's childhood and a depiction of some trauma that has driven her repulsion toward sex. But all we see of her childhood is a photograph of a family group, glimpsed three times in the film: Once when the camera is surveying the furnishings of the living room in the apartment she shares with her sister, Helen; again when the brutish landlord, before attempting to rape Carol, picks it up and identifies the little blond girl in the picture as her as a child; and at the very end, when the camera tracks into the photograph, singling out the girl and drawing ever closer to her face, finally closing in on the little girl's eye and bringing us back to the opening of the film and its closeup on the adult Carol's eye. The expression on her face is distant, almost blank -- an expression we have seen throughout the film on the grownup Carol's face. What are we to make of this? That Carol was the victim of a childhood sexual trauma? Polanski chooses not to tell us because the focus of his film is on the effect rather than the cause. Carol has apparently been "normal" enough to learn a trade as a beautician, to hold down a job in a salon, to have a handsome boyfriend. But suddenly that "normality" is shattered when her sister decides to go off on a vacation to Italy with her own boyfriend, Michael, whom Carol detests. Left to her own devices, Carol spirals into insanity and eventually into murder. Whenever a headline-making crime occurs -- a mass shooting or something like today's news about a Southern California couple who kept their children prisoners and starved and tortured them for years -- our first instinct is to ask why they did it. And we rarely come upon the sources of the criminal's disturbance. The neighbors usually say he was such a quiet boy, or she was shy and a little weird but seemed nice enough. Polanski keeps us on edge through the film by making Carol's environment one that is simultaneously ordinary and conducive to madness: a piano playing scales somewhere in the apartment building, a neighboring Catholic school ringing bells, a shabby apartment full of dark corners and odd angles, a beauty salon whose customers undergo grotesque treatments like mud packs to improve their looks. On the street she passes an odd trio of buskers (one of whom is played by Polanski) and is harassed by a construction worker. Even her boyfriend, Colin, is a little edgy, having dated this beautiful woman long enough to expect her to have sex with him. In the end, it's as if Carol lashes out at a world that gets on her nerves. Polanski's film seems to be asking if that horror resides within all of us. 

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986)

There's no good reason why Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring should have been two films rather than one. They were shot together over the course of seven months, but released separately, Manon following Jean after about three months. Shown together as one film, they would total some 230 minutes -- only a bit longer than Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) at 212 minutes or Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) at 222 minutes. But the length of those films seems consistent with their epic pretensions, whereas Jean/Manon together amount to a domestic melodrama -- an entertaining one, with a beautiful Provençal setting, but far from an epic. Their separate releases feel a bit like a con -- as in economics. Films of that blockbuster length are a drag on the exhibitor, who must schedule fewer showings per day, so it probably made sense to release Jean, which unabashedly announces at the end that it's "part one," to whet an appetite for Manon, whose posters announced it as the second part of Jean de Florette. Voilà! double the box office take. In fact, Manon of the Spring had been filmed before, by Marcel Pagnol in 1952, and it had been a long film, as much as four hours, before being cut by the distributor. Pagnol was so upset by this experience that he turned the screenplay into a novel, L'Eau des Collines, adding the story of Manon's father, Jean, which had been only a backstory in his film. And it's this novel that Claude Berri decided to adapt into his two films. The problem I see, having just watched Berri's films back to back, is that there's not quite enough material for two. Jean de Florette is an overextended prequel, introducing the characters of César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil), and their villainous attempt to cut off the water supply to Jean (Gérard Depardieu), the newcomer who inherits the estate they covet. Or perhaps Manon of the Spring is a thinly developed sequel, in which Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), avenges her father. If Jean had been trimmed of some of the scenes of Jean raising rabbits and Manon of some of the shots of Manon gamboling with her goats in the hills -- as well as the romantic subplot involving the new village schoolteacher (Hippolyte Girardot) -- both stories could have fitted nicely into one movie. Manon climaxes with a scene in which César learns an uncomfortable truth about Jean's parentage, but Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drag the film out after that revelation, which should have been left to make its impact. Still, Berri's films have much to recommend them, especially the performances of Montand, Auteuil, and Depardieu (the last is sorely missed in the second film) and the beautiful cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. Jean-Claude Petit's score makes good use of themes from the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino.