El desierto rojo

Antonioni’s fourth film in a row with muse Monica Vitti sees the actress in perhaps her most difficult role yet; her co-star was Richard Harris: it was certainly interesting that the director wanted him so soon after having achieved stardom with Lindsay Anderson’s THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963) but, in retrospect, his is a part that anybody could have filled in adequately. It was ironic, then, that Harris and Antonioni didn’t see eye to eye and, reportedly, the former walked off the set (or was “kicked off”, depending on what sources one reads) and the film had to be completed with a double for its male star!

Anyway, the industrial wasteland (full of fuming factories, polluted rivers, massive steel structures, plague-ridden merchant ships) against which the events are set is supposed to mirror the lead character’s emotional turmoil; we first see her literally “scrounging for her next meal” (as Bob Dylan famously sang). Despite being ostensibly a character study, what we get – as is Antonioni’s fashion – are vaguely-defined characters and half-disclosed information (such as the nature of work in which both Harris and Vitti’s husband are involved, her own traffic accident which brought on her mental collapse, her son’s sudden and apparently inexplicable disability, the plague outbreak, and the source of the singing heard by the girl in the fable recounted by Vitti to her convalescent offspring).

As in BLOWUP (1966), the Italian surroundings here are made to seem other-wordly – as if the narrative was taking place in some forbidding science-fiction landscape; this is augmented by the electronics-infused soundtrack (occasionally interrupted by ethereal vocals, as mentioned earlier) and the meticulous color scheme (RED DESERT marked Antonioni’s departure from black-and-white cinema – in retrospect, it also emerges as one of his most haunting efforts). The film is quite long, however, and drags a bit during its second half…but the ending is, once again, inspired – with Vitti finally opening up, even if it’s in front of a foreign (and, therefore, non-comprehending) sailor.

The undeniable highlights of the piece are the Sunday afternoon outing at a remote cabin which develops into an orgy and the visualization of the afore-mentioned fable (featuring the red desert, actually pink-colored sand, of the title which symbolizes a sunny Utopia away from the contaminations of the modern world). RED DESERT won two prizes at the Venice Film Festival including the Golden Lion, the top honor, over Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1964). Curiously enough, after this, both Antonioni and Vitti went ‘mod’ in Britain with BLOWUP and Joseph Losey’s MODESTY BLAISE (1966) respectively.

I’ve been tempted to pick up the R4 SE DVD of this one – featuring an Audio Commentary and a 1-hour documentary on the director (also available on the Criterion 2-Disc Set of Antonioni and Vitti’s previous collaboration, L’ECLISSE [1962], which I’ve just ordered!) – but, since the R1 Image disc is now OOP and a number of that company’s titles have received the Criterion treatment, it shouldn’t be too long (especially now that the film-maker has passed away) before it’s time for RED DESERT to get its own re-release...

It seems to me that of the two brief retrospectives I recently embarked on, Antonioni’s has emerged as the more rewarding; some of Ingmar Bergman’s films would rate very highly on their own but, collectively, they lack the visual diversity which lends the Italian film-maker’s work its lingering fascination and compulsive aura of mystery.

Usually, I see a film and comment on it. If it is one I have seen before, that comment has folds from my life and internal imagination. Every film I have seen builds that imagination in some way. A few are profound and some of those are knowingly so, either me or the film knowing.

I saw this a great many years ago, when visual wisdom was less familiar and it had a great impact on me. At that time, the intellectual economy was fueled by a sort of controlled French angst, formatted for digestibility by young college minds. It really was so. Malick was one in my vicinity who could master a meal made of this without excluding more nourishing things, but that is a different story than the one I want to tell.

I cannot recall the year, perhaps 1966, I saw this at the Orson Welles theater in Cambridge. Since then, I collect the sounds of waves on beaches. I've travelled widely and for some reason have a near perfect aural recall of each experience of the watered desert. It is my primary anchor to the forms of nature.

The shape of this film is an outer world, bleaker than anything Lynch has given us. It is a beast of form: factories that even today amaze me with their power. If this existed in Italy — which I have no doubt — then Soviet stuff is beyond my tolerance. Huge threatening forms seem created by gods to swallow color and thereby grow, engulfing everything. Within this we have a sole conscious mind succumbing. We drift, we succumb. The art here is homeopathic: we are given an experience in color that has power not in brilliance but in what is not there, what has already been swallowed. The cinematic vocabulary of form — three dimensional space — eating minds denoted by color... it is effective. This is Antonioni's greatest accomplishment, I believe.

Nested in this is an inner cinematic world, an island not yet visited by the diseased lumbering ships that spew clotted filth. It is just starting to be explored by a keen, clean sailing vessel. This is literally an island populated by a Miranda, the young, still vibrant inner self that remains of our on-screen body, the woman we have besieged in the outer film.

But this inner film is a contrast: color abounds. The forms do not contain, they rest. The colors have subdued and incorporated the forms that flow. In a subconscious way, these informed my life as an architect, first in form and later in more encompassing conceptual form. We have a newly adolescent girl on the beach, experiencing rather than observing. Her own inner form hinted at futures in the same way that the outer film's colors hinted at rich pasts.

And at about 1:22 in, we have those waves. The filmmaker has not only manipulated contrasts in color and form, but in the sound experience as well. At this inner beach, the sound is lush, hyper real. We have a few moments of the fullest life you can experience as we hear the smallish waves encounter the beach. May you enjoy and cherish these curated sounds.

In most beaches, each wave is shaped not by an encounter with the sand, land, but by an encounter with the preceding, receding wave, newly exhausted by its desires and reseeding a growing desire in the next. It is a water to water rhythm of desire that incidentally involves the form of the beach.

Not here. The waves are gentle enough to speak directly to the beach. We have not stirred the greater urges yet: the girl is young — as young as I was (being male). The caress of water on sand conveys the soft swallow of coarse sand, pillowing and sucking the water. A soft thump unlike anything else, that can only be evoked in memories as primal as taste: scotch, sex, sea air.

May you find something like this experience in your encounter with cinema, something to anchor the story you tell yourself about ideal order.

(That same beach is mapped onto a shack, outside to inside and painted red in the later images.)

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

I honestly have no idea what made me push through full two hours of this movie, it may have been my curiosity, or some doubt that this movie may be trying to tell me something important which may unravel by the end.. If there was an underlying philosophical theme, I have completely failed to grasp it. I don't think there was any philosophical background to it all.. The quality of cinematography in this piece cannot be argued though..

For me, this movie is as close depiction of insanity that I have ever seen it in any movie, without any shugar coating, it is raw and disturbing, coupled with a very depressing yet beautiful visuals of the industrial wasteland. I'm not an expert in psychology, but the beautiful italian lady seems to be suffering from a severe bipolar disorder coupled with a strong narcissistic traits.

The thing that really bothered me was the randomness of events in this movie, and by the very end I just couldn't wrap my head around it all.The only movie that I could moderately compare to this one to in style and aesthetics would be Stalker, with long speechless shots and gloomy surroundings. But again, Stalker gave me something to work with, as opposed to this movie which just left me guessing whats the meaning of it all.. I'm usually a very oppinionated movie viewer, but this time I'll just pass giving any rating..

If you're willing to see what insanity looks like close up with none of light motifs usually following in those kind of movies, be my guest, but if you are prone to anxiety, I would urge you to not watch this because I'm not a very anxious person, and after watching I feel like I've had a freight train run through my head.

In this, his first step away from moody black and white cinema, experimental filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni sets out to "paint with color," and he succeeds with spectacular effect. Each shot resonates with artistry, from the lingering, hazy landscapes to the more complex, structured confines of a factory warehouse. Magnificently well-composed, it truly is like a moving painting. Slow-moving, I should say, because the famed director isn't shy about letting the camera linger and roam. Often, we'll wander away from subjects at the end of their scene to follow a line of paint up the wall or trace a curve of pipes through the cement ceiling. This seems essential, as the light storytelling and rambling, philosophical dialog constantly relies on such subtleties to deliver a sense of deeper meaning. The scant plot, focused around a timid, depressed housewife and her struggle to come to terms with the sad state of her life, can be a tall ask at times because it's so excruciatingly glacier-paced and spiritually draining. The bleak, industrial setting - where billowing towers of man-made chemicals and haunting, noisy machinery are the rule of the day - contains loud metaphors for the character's internal conflict, but you'll have to look and dig to find them. Not an easy film to watch, it can be fascinating but also extremely demanding. I'd call it a mixed success. In terms of proving the medium as a legitimate art form, it's a roaring triumph. As an engaging narrative, it falls very short.

"Red Desert" (Italian, 1964): Michelangelo Antonioni made this film prior to "Blow Up", but you can see where he was headed. "Red Desert" is about a deeply troubled, beautiful woman who seems to have it all – including a stable, handsome husband, a precocious son, and fun, sexy friends. Yes, she DOES live in an industrial wasteland managed by her spouse… True, even the birds know better than to fly anywhere near this area of floating and flowing poisons, but she has larger concerns. "Red Desert" is wonderfully symbolic (the title will make sense later in the film), and illustrates confused, tortured states of mind with landscapes & sets, not to mention the utterings & behavior of this woman. But, IS she insane, or, like the birds, simply failing to accept this environment? Watch the fog, architecture, room colors, lack of dialog, physical disconnects, out of focus camera, illogical gestures…listen to her stories, the sound track (which is electronic, and dated), and the random events heard that seem to have no resolution. "Red Desert" is TRULY a great film about alienation in the "modern" age.