Review #79: 'Red Desert' (1964)

"There's something terrible in reality," Guiliana (Monica Viti) tells Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) towards the end of the film. This statement encapsulates Viti's character perfectly. Guiliana is withdrawn, has bouts of anxiety and paranoia. She had previously been in a car accident involving a van and been hospitalised for a year with serious shock. This role is played beautifully by Viti (who had collaborated with Antonioni on his three previous films); whilst she strikes the occasional contorted pose, she uses her eyes majestically to portray a fractured, anxious thought process. If her eyes are not frantically darting around, encapsulating immaculate confusion, then they are sunken, glacial, and permeated with sadness.

Guiliana is married, but on meeting her, Corrado seems almost infatuated with her awkward, unstable demeanour. They enter into a subdued affair that is restrained by her seemingly perpetual elusiveness. She is haunted by details - that we have no awareness - of the road accident. It could also be argued that Guiliana is affected by the surroundings she inhabits. The film is set in Ravenna, an industrialised, bleak landscape of factories; chimneys pumping out fumes, infecting the horizon with a dense fog. All that is left of the natural surroundings of field and trees, is the bare-bones of rotten, forgotten husks. The once-green grass churned into slurry. The infected waters, yellow and frothing as the waves hit the poisonous rocks.

This was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in colour. The last in a loose tetralogy informed with themes of alienation in the modern, industrialised world. Red Desert was preceded by L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). Whilst much of the landscape filmed here, the overall effect of the visuals is astonishingly beautiful. These stark, brooding images stay with you. Whilst the natural colours (dissipated by the onslaught of industrial waste infecting the air) are washed out by heavy pollution, Antonioni lightly daubs his mise-en-scene with slight painterly strokes of colour (often out-of-focus) across the composition with a mass-produced object of manufactured descent.

The theme of the relationship between the polluting element of the manufacturing industry with human emotion is open to interpretation in this film. Do we see these objects of consumerist desires that illuminate the screen with their intensely garish, gauche, fabricated colours, as the fundamental fascination with the industrial age? Are we, like Guiliana, so totally absorbed by our modernist surroundings that we find solace in the objects that this modern industrial age has produced? Any film that is open to new ideas excites me. A film that can be represented with new adaptation of thought. Our understanding of technology, and the changing face of industrialisation/globalisation will undoubtedly change, as I am sure will the interpretations of this beautifully constructed piece of cinema/art.

Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Starring: Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti
Country: Italy/France

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy