Main Cast: Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti, Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir
Release Year: 1964
Country: IT/FR
Run Time: 120 minutes
Plot
Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti. Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed form of depression and malaise. Her quicksilver emotional shifts disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman. Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the conventional sense. Monica Vitti's sense of isolation is heightened by Antonioni's (and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's) choice of colors, and especially by Carlo Savina's bizarre electronic musical score. This is a landmark movie in Antonioni's effort to portray alienated individuals in contemporary life; he places people against towering forms of technology to emphasize their smallness and lostness in the modern world of technological change. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
In his first color film, Michelangelo Antonioni expressively visualized the inner turmoil of a well-heeled wife as she tries to put her life together after a nervous breakdown. Beginning with the title sequence of an out-of-focus factory, Antonioni creates a near-abstract vision of modernity, replete with power stations, radar towers, merchant ships, and stark domestic interiors, drained of natural colors. Monica Vitti's Giuliana inhabits a world of smokestacks belching yellow poison, rotted brown industrial locations occasionally punctuated by brightly painted machinery, and thick gray ocean fogs that contrast sharply with the pristine blue sea and pink sands of her imagined fairy tale. Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's shallow depth of field repeatedly folds Giuliana into the desolate, blurry landscape, yet it emphasizes her alienation by setting her off in sharp focus; she cannot comfortably exist in a world that engulfs her. The dissonant electronic score and soundtrack of noisy machinery enhances the representation of Giuliana's unease. Red Desert's extraordinary deployment of color inspired Federico Fellini, among others, to add color to his experiments with film form, while the legacy of Antonioni's study of environmental female dislocation can be felt most notably in Todd Haynes's Safe (1995), often considered one of the best American movies of the 1990s. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Red Desert (Italian: Il deserto rosso) is a 1964Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, written by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra and starring Monica Vitti with Richard Harris. This was Antonioni's first color film. The working title was Celeste e verde (Sky blue and green).[1]Il deserto rosso was awarded the Golden Lion at the 25th Venice Film Festival in 1964. It is also sometimes noted as the last in a series of four films he made with Vitti over five years beginning in 1959 and ending in 1964, the three before being L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962).
As the film opens, Giuliana (Vitti) has been released from the hospital after having attempted suicide. She lives with her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), director of a nationalized plant which is going through a strike, along with their young son. Giuliana feels estranged from her family and disconnected from the world. Ugo's friend Zeller (Richard Harris) comes to Ravenna to make a business deal and is drawn to her. Zeller may understand her troubles more than Ugo does, but this is not enough to sway Giuliana from her worries.
Cinematography
Vitti and the colour red in Il deserto rosso (1964)
The film is set in the industrial area of 1960s Ravenna with sprawling new post World War Two factories, industrial machinery and a much polluted river valley. The cinematography is highlighted by pastel colors with flowing white smoke and fog. The sound design blends a foley of industrial and urban sounds with ghostly ship horns and an electronic music score. This was Antonioni's first colour film, which the director said he wanted to shoot like a painting on a canvas:
“
I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas; I want to invent the colour relationships, and not limit myself to photographing only natural colours.[2]
”
As he would do in later film productions, Antonioni went to great lengths in reaching this goal, such as having trees and grass painted white or grey to fit his take on an urban landscape.[2] The colour red was used to show Giuliana's torn, wounded feelings and sexual longing. Andrew Sarris called the red hued pipes and railings "the architecture of anxiety: the reds and blues exclaim as much as they explain".[2]
Meaning
Screenshot from the film: "My intention..." said Antonioni, "was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful."
Although on one level Red Desert might be taken as a story about a harsh modern industrial culture to which only the neurotic Giuliana has awakened, Antonioni later said he wanted to show that industrial technology has a beauty of its own and that he had filmed a story about human adaptability, in that Giuliana
“
...must confront her social environment. It's too simplistic to say - as many people have done - that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.[2]
”
References
^ Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Page 169.
^ abcd Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Paul Duncan. Michelangelo Antonioni: The Investigation. Taschen, 2004. ISBN 3822830895. Pages 91-95.
