Michelangelo Antonioni’s, first color film, “Red Desert”, is an art movie concerned with the Neurotic breakdown of a beautiful woman. In the movie Antonioni compares his heroine, Giuliana (the ravishing Monica Vitti), to the contaminating industrial Age of Italy’s economic boom of the 1960’s.
He filmed his story like a painter paints his pictures. Purposefully choosing seeming cold, ugly architectures and poisoned environments for his palette, Antonioni succeeds in showing beauty in what he sees. Poisonous smoke emitted out of smokestacks envelope the sky like pretty clouds, steel canisters are shown in colorful pastels and adjacent seemingly lifeless fields have a reflective grey to their visage. The industrial Port of the Italian City of Ravanna is enveloped by a magnificent freight ship as seen through small windows in humble shacks. Antonioni’s camera loves to linger and linger it does, following endless pipes of a factory and Port before landing on its solemn characters. The director wanted me to have time, while watching, so that I could take in these images and contemplate their meanings.
As in his previous three films in the 60’s, “Red Desert”, gives no conclusive ending or clean observation. It is a story about life. Nothing to special about the life shown, except its main protagonist is the wife of an industrialist who seems to like being married to her because of her beauty and nothing else. They have a small son, whom they love and are part of a society that is considered the elite of the industrial world.
The movie begins with a union call to strike, hinting at some leftist politics, but then quickly forgets not only the politics but also the average worker. The movie concerns itself with the managers and owners. The elite. Like in L’Adventura (Antonioni’s masterpiece from 1960), these elite are bored and their boredom causes them to act a bit off.
Giuliana understands that her husband has no real love for her, so she goes about searching for it with one of his Industrialist acquaintances, Corrado (The Irish actor Richard Harris, dubbed in Italian). He is drawn by her beauty and lust. She understands this and it enhances her neurotic behavior as she seems to be going slightly mad. This is basically all of the real action occurring in the film and is made to stretch to almost two hours. Yet, each of the scenes are breathtakingly pretty and ugly at the same time. The visuals are what kept my attention.
By emphasizing the industrial factory sounds and using an unmelodious electronic soundtrack, Antonioni succeeds in giving his picture an almost futuristic and science fiction feel, which matches the mindset of Giuliana going mad. For most of the movie, there is not much action going on within the characters as this is more of an emotional and visual film rather than a literal one.
There are two stand-out scenes that piqued my attention. The first shows a group of these industrialists and their women (including Giuliana, her husband and Corrado), socializing in the blue-collar workers shack at the Port. It is a scene that verges on descending into an orgy, similar to the one shown in Antonioni’s, “The Night”, but instead manifests itself into anarchy as the participants start destroying the shack bit by bit.
The 2nd scene is a dream sequence of a story that Giuliana tells her son about a 12-year-old girl who escapes into a paradise lagoon of pink waters and no people. While the girl looks nothing like Giuliana in her depiction, as she has a darker skin that I saw representing the working class, this scene seemed to represent the passionate inner drive of Giuliana to escape her modern and industrial world. The stunning contrast of the lagoon with the rest of the movie is stunning.
There are still parts of the movie that required great effort on my part to stay awake due to its extremely slow pace. This is still a stimulating work of art made by an auteur who preferred to paint rather than film his movies.
1001 Movies before you die 