The Plot.The movie director Niccolo has just been left by his wife. This gives him the idea of making a movie about women's relationships. He starts to search for a woman who can play the leading part in the movie - but also in his own life.I love Antonioni. Every frame has meaning. But his films also require time and concentration. Many today would find them boring and slow.Count this movie one of them. But I really love it. It's beautiful to look at and sucks you in slowly. It takes it's time for the plot to unfold and maybe it's not going to tie up loose ends. That's what makes it so compelling. You can watch it a hundred times and find something new each time.

Negative reviews or remarks about this masterwork should be ignored. If you follow the director's career from his first films forward, this investigation places among his greatest works. His concerns, (with the impossibility of a personal identity, with a default identity in/as landscape, cityscapes, with ravishing interiors and an exterior world that is terrifyingly beautiful, fraught with allure and menace in equal parts), are fully realized here. There are no "howlers," the dialog is never precious nor pompous nor pretentious, and when heard in Italian, is, like every element of Antonioni's works, determined, controlled, but completely natural, credible. No movie ever made has been less "misogynistic," and the fictional director in the film and the director of the film speak with such candor it's exhilarating. A must-see.

I can understand why this film has received 10/10 - it's excellent.Perhaps the most surprising element is the ending - it's in such strong contrast to the rest of the film, that it is akin to a psychological 'splitting off' by the main character, Niccolo. As he gazes into his own imaginary world, he experiences, in imagined dialogue with his nephew, a scenario from a film he may direct - a spaceship flies towards the sun, which appears to explode or expand, and fantasises about receiving the answers 'to so many things'.It links in with the 'sun expanding' headline glimpsed from a newspaper earlier in the film, and works well for this ground being set for it.I cannot decided whether this ending is bleak or hopeful - whether he escapes into a world of fantasy because of his inability to face up to the pain involved in looking at his impotence in resolving the relationship issues in his life; or whether it is a transcendental ending, in which he uses his situation to plunge into a creative world.It's this ambiguity (and lack of didactic intent from Antonioni) which gives the film its quality and power.

(sort of spoilers, i suppose)Identification of a Woman was Antonioni's first film in Italy since the beautiful Red Desert. And its a quieter, more mature film than his international films.I'm glad I saw Identification of a Woman because it contains one of Antonioni's most beautiful sequences: the scenes in the fog, with people disappearing and reappearing. And also because we have something here we don't always have: characters and what almost resembles a story.We have an Antonioni-esque film director looking for the ideal female face for his next film.I think the film's about how men misunderstand women. They're only spying on them (spying is a recurring motif in the film), looking on from the outside, as if they were merely faces: I think this is why the (approximate) story of the film centres on a man looking for the perfect face for his new movie (ie, not the perfect woman).Be prepared, though, to not hold up hopes that Antonioni will stick with this story - because its left for you to decide whether a face, or a woman, are identified. This is not a flaw in the film - it was Antonioni's trademark.But if you only had so many hours of your life to spare for Antonioni films, i don't recommend you use up two on this one.It definitely doesn't have the passion and enthusiasm of Zabriskie Point - aside from his great works (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, The Passenger), i'd recommend you see the visually exhilirating Zabriskie Point instead of this.Caution: fairly extreme nudity and sex, mostly not of an erotic nature, but fairly intense (not rape or anything like that... just fairly hungry, physical sex).