Having just read about and looked at still photographer Edward Weston's exploration of shooting in color, I resumed my trek through the films on DVD of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007 with his first foray into color, "Il deserto rosso" (The Red Desert, 1964).

His previous film, "L'eclisse" ended with shots of dusk in the Roman neighborhood where the romantic leads, Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, were supposed to rendezvous (again), ending with a closeup of a streetlight coming on. "Red Desert" begins without any human beings, with a smokestack belching yellow flames (or bursts of sulfurous smoke). Scenes of a nuclear power plant in the vicinity of Ravenna in northeastern Italy gradually add some human beings to the exploration of industrial architecture.

There are strikers in a drab, foggy, muddy area outside the power plant's fence. Slowly, a woman with reddish brown hair in a green coat and her child (at first I thought it was a girl, but it is her son) clad in shorts, knee-high black socks, and an undrab brown coat. Mother and child stand out visually.

She approaches one of the strikers and buys the sandwich that he has already started to eat, takes it off by herself and wolfs it down. I was already wondering what happened to the child, even more so when Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is inside the factory (with pipes painted in vivid primary colors) and finds her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) showing a visiting engineer, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), around. The latter's first look at Giuliana could also be categorized as vulpine. She flees to her husband's office.

Ugo explains that his wife was in a minor automobile accident, but traumatized and in a mental asylum for a month after it and has not fully recovered. (Later, we will learn that Ugo was away at the time of the accident and did not return and infer that he has little interest in his wife any more, except as the mother of his son.)

Corrado (who is supposed to be Italian, to reside in Milan, but to travel a lot) is in Ravenna to recruit workers for a project at one of the ends of the earth (Tierra del Fuego at the southern end of South America). Considering that Ugo is scrambling to keep the plant running while the workers are on strike, helping Corrado to find workers to go off for more than a year makes no sense. Not that Antonioni was ever much bothered by narrative plausibility!

Having gotten this far in my Antonioni retrospective, even if I had not seen "Red Desert" before (long ago, before, I think I saw the alienation trilogy), I'd know that (1) Giuliana and Corrado would have a sexual liaison, (2) Giuliana would not be satisfied or her neuroticism cured by it, and (3) Ugo would not fall back in love with Giuliana. There are surprises, but not about any of the three points of the triangle, though they are part of a quasi-orgy (as lacking in sensuality or satisfaction as the writhing in bed of Giuliana and Corrado. The surprise is that the son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi) fakes polio (to avoid going to kindergarten). While bedridden, he asks his mother to tell him her story about cranes again. Typically of Antonioni, there are no cranes in the story. Still, the story of a young woman estranged from everyone who spends her time swimming in an azure sea in a cove of flesh-colored limestone rocks provides maximal contrast with the environmental degradation of the rest of the movie. It provides a visual relief of a tropical idyll, but, also typically of Antonioni, does not resolve the mystery of what the young woman hears (and which the audience heard at the start of the movie).

Corrado is going away on a ship. After seeing him on it, Giuliana toys with running away on a Greek (or Turkish?) ship. She has a conversation with a worker from the ship who does not speak Italian (and whose lines are not subtitled into English or Italian), and backs off. The part of the woman unable to communicate (and seemingly unsure of what she wants) seems very Bergman. Vitti's character in "L'eclisse" had some fun and has moments ot unselfconsciousness, but the closest she comes to a moment of joy in "Red Desert" is her relief at seeing that her son can still walk (when he doesn't know he's being observed) and doesn't have polio. It is more a manic moment than a glint of happiness. She certainly fails to find happiness with Corrado, though he pays more attention to her than Ugo does.

At the very end of the movie, she and Valerio and the toxic emissions from the start are reunited. She reassures him that birds have learned not to try to fly through the smoke. This has been interpreted as a hopeful ending, an indication that she has learned how to avoid flying through toxic fumes herself. Either as a cure for neuroticism or the alienation of modern life, this seems quite weak (grasping for straws?). Perhaps she lives less unhappily ever after. Antonioni's next films were in English, so this is the last glimpse of his muse in Antonioni's oeuvre. (I'd say that Vanessa Redgrave took her place in "Blow Up," Antonioni's second color film.)

Anyone undertaking viewing an Antonioni film needs to abandon any expectation of narrative development or character development. Antonioni aimed to paint with the camera, not record line-reading by actors. His framings were every bit as composed as those of Edward Weston (before and after Weston undertook to understand the sculptural aspects of "color as form"). Antonioni began as a documentarian and "Red Desert" documents the extreme environmental degradation of the industrialization of (his native) northern Italy. Air and water and ground are all despoiled, and for good measure, he adds a ship quarantined for some unspecified contagious disease and the simulated polio.

Along with the industrial pollution that underlay Italian prosperity, there is the acute alienation of Monica Vitti on display in "Red Desert." Her character is neglected and unhappy--and not exactly a joy to be around. Like the heroine of "L'amích" she is planning to open a shop--a rather large and empty space where Corrado tracks her down and is solicitous (as a means to seduce her, it seems to me).

Vitti was accused of overacting by some, hailed by others. Richard Harris was certainly capable of overacting, but was very muted in "Red Desert." He had been very macho in his previous roles ("This Sporting Life," "Mutiny on the Bounty") and in later ones ("A Man Called Horse" in particular). I wonder why Antonioni wanted to cast him and then so flattened him. It doesn't help that Harris was dubbed into Italian by someone who does not sound at all like him (in contrast to Vitti's previous partner, Alain Delon in "L'eclisse"). None of the characters is well developed. The other women are far less developed than in "L'amích" and what Ugo wants from Giuliana or from life is undecipherable.

"Il deserto rosso" won the grand prize at the (nearby) Venice Film Festival. Its use of color (mostly muted, but with vividly painted pipes in Giuliana and Ugo's apartment to match those in the factory) attracted much favorable attention. I remember being underwhelmed by the film when I saw it decades ago on a big screen. "La notte" seemed better to me than I remembered, but despite being able to divert myself with intertextualities in "Il deserto rosso" to other Antonioni films and knowing that Antonioni was not interested in providing entertainment in his cinema, I do not thing that "Il deserto rosso" is a successful experiment. Obviously, it cannot be recommended to those seeking entertainment and expecting character development or a story of any interest. Some are interested in it for feminist and ecologist messages before the feminist and ecological movements blossomed. Granting that historical interest, I'd much rather watch "L'eclisse" or "Blow-Up" than "Il deserto rosso."

The DVD with no extras other than talent files is hard to come by (a friend borrowed it from the Stanford University Library for me). At first, I thought that the transfer was from a deteriorated print, but Antonioni used blurred focus periodically throughout the movie, particularly out-of-focus backdrops to Vitti (who is always in focus). The desaturated colors and the variable focus are from the original, not problems with DVD transfer.

I like the colors in "Zabriskie Point" (a locale in which Weston shot in both color and black and white) and "Blow Up" better than the hyper-stylized ones of "Il deserto rosso," my least favorite Antonioni film (from before his stroke). If anyone cares, I think that if the previous three films are an "alienation trilogy," "Il deserto rosso" makes it a tetraology with Monica Vitti more alienated than in any of the three films of the "trilogy." Also, I weas recently in Ravenna, which is an ugly industrial city surrounding the Roman and medieval old city, and think that Antonioni exaggerated the industrial pollution, even if it was worse then than now. I know that he had grass painted to get the shade he wanted.)


---

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray


The other stations of the Antonioni cross:
Cronaca di una amore (1950)
L'amíche (1955)
Il Grido (1958),
L'Aventtura (1960)
La Notte (1961)
L'eclisse (1962),
plus the one that was popular beyond art-house theaters,
Blow-Up (1966),
and his disappointing contribution to the trilogy Eros (2004, but see the bonus feature on it of Antonion and an earlier Michelangelo!)

"The Passenger" (and maybe "Zabriskie Point," which is not on DVD) are still ahead.




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age