The Red Desert (Il deserto rosso)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra
1964/Italy/France
Film Duemila/Federiz/Francoriz Production
First viewing/Netflix rental
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Giuliana: There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me.[/box]
For his first color film, Antonioni turns Italy into a colorless industrial wasteland matching his heroine’s fragile state of mind.
The story is set largely in and on the margins of bleak, polluted factories. Guliana’s (Monica Vitti) husband Ugo manages one of these. Early on, he tells colleague Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) that she had a traffic accident in which she suffered minor physical injuries but mental shock that necessitated hospitalization for a month. She still has not fully recovered from her mental problems. Ugo is not really aware of the extent of Guliana’s malaise. Ugo and Guliano have a son, who is around five or six years old.
During the course of the story, we see Guliana try and fail to find some meaning in her life. Eventually, she has a brief affair with Corrado but that doesn’t help either. Still Antonioni gives us a glimmer of hope in the final moments when Guliana is able both to look at her environment and walk away from its poison.
I feel like I missed a lot on this first viewing. The film is so spectacular to look at and Vitti is so awesome, however, that I feel like I will give it another try at some point.
