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Michael Brooke admires Antonioni's creative world perspective in this extraordinary psychological drama.

Embarking upon his first colour feature, Michelangelo Antonioni said “I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas”. And he was true to his word, literally painting trees, grass and even a fruit stall’s contents dull grey while highlighting other objects in vivid reds, the better to render the disturbed mental state of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) in visually tangible form.

Aside from a fantasy interlude in a shockingly azure sea, the film is largely set against the decaying industrial landscape of Ravenna, yellow flames belching from chimneys that tower over greenish-grey polluted lakes. Cargo ships pass in the distance, often emerging out of thick fog, and images are often deliberately blurred, reduced to shapeless blobs of colour, with natural sounds subjected to electronic distortion. “There’s something terrible in reality, and I don’t know what it is”, says Giuliana, and it’s her lack of this knowledge and growing awareness of the impermanence of life that gives the film its constant psychological tension. She’s been hospitalised after a car crash, and her husband doesn’t understand that this has left her with as many lasting mental scars as physical ones, her suicide attempt notwithstanding. However, a brief liaison with her husband’s industrialist colleague Corrado (Richard Harris) proves just as unfulfilling, as does what must be the least erotic ‘orgy’ ever committed to film: Giuliana’s problems are too deep-seated for that kind of easy release. Vitti’s extraordinary performance in an almost impossibly difficult part prevents the film from becoming a mere aesthetic exercise, though even on this score the film is riveting. No-one has ever looked at the world quite like this, and it’s easy to believe Antonioni when he denied that Red Desert was a condemnation of industrial decay and its dehumanising side-effects: his images have a weird beauty that’s quite at odds with their content. The film’s transfer is sourced directly from the original negative and the package an exhaustively thorough commentary.

 

Michael Brooke on 2nd October 2008
View all 112 of Michael Brooke's reviews

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