Red Desert (1964)

The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was a survivor of an era, one in which enthusiastic experimentation could still be combined with thoughtful sequences. Antonioni is a fundamental auteur in the evolution of 20th century European cinema, his initial Neorealist techniques were modeled and enriched by the study of different social classes, especially the alienated bourgeoisie. In the early days of his legacy, he was a personal assistant to legendary directors like Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini. Soon, he started to shape distinctive styles composed by radical dialogues with aesthetic forms, and his scripts began to take the form of valuable literary pieces.

After cinematographic pieces like L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962), Antonioni developed the unparalleled Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964); his tenth feature film and first one in color. These four special titles made up his legendary body of films dedicated to sentimental geography, isolation and the mutations of contemporary man. According to Antonioni: “I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.”

Red Desert imposes a unique visual richness for the viewer, the film is filled with a tremendously expressive and allegorical use of color. Antonioni reinvents the language and meaning of colors without limiting himself to photograph the landscapes that nature offers. To quote French painter Henri Matisse: “For the same object there is no fixed color. The blues are not always the sky and the greens are not always trees”. The film moves within the characters but focuses its gaze on the exterior of a modified reality, not only by color, but also by atypical frames and intriguing geometric shapes. The colors are cold and hospitable, they serve to define the emotional changes of the characters. The film’s drama focuses on the mysterious existence of Giuliana (Monica Vitti). Initially, the woman appears with a languid expression and a face of weariness, accompanied by her four-year-old son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi). Giuliana is convalescing from a mental crisis produced after suffering a serious traffic accident. Throughout the story, she will be trapped between two men: her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), an industrial electronic engineer, and the seductive outsider/mining engineer Corrado (Richard Harris), with whom the woman believes she can find a way out of her emotional instability.

Removing everything from the plot, which is virtually non-existent, and without distancing itself from moral or political references and views, the film visually builds a stifled suffocating style in which the characters seem to move but remain totally inactive. The events take place inside the outskirts of the Italian port of Ravenna, where Antonioni makes use of an alienating, gray and hyper-industrialized landscape of factories; a sort of desolate concentration camp where consciences are completely destroyed. There’s a huge wave of fog that covers, hides, judges, and defines the characters. The film contains the sense of awareness of the moral dissolution, mental disintegration and decline of an entire social class that thrives on its mentality and misery. In this universe, the everyday world has become a forest of iron: water and land are poisoned, the steel pipes are rusted and threatened. Everything is dead and dehumanized, like all the characters and human relationships. The viewer can breathe the crushing frivolity and lack of empathy in the air. Inside this system, the dissatisfied Giuliana is developing her monotonous life. At one point, she says: “There’s something terrible in reality and I don’t know what it is. No one will tell me”. Giuliana tries to represent intuitive and natural health, but wanders traumatized. The woman wants to react and seek for love or answers, but she only finds sex. Her greatest fear is being afraid, and she cannot find freedom or feel life. Giuliana unravels the simulacrum of bourgeois fiction and contemplates a world in which the decomposition moves between regenerative desire and pain.

Red Desert arises in a universe of poetic and philosophical thoughts about existential emptiness, inner sadness, denaturalization of the world and the complexity of women’s insertion in modern society. A dream, a patchwork of thoughts and ideas, an abstract visual experience that allows us to carve on it through the years. As the minutes reach the end of the film, this universe paints an extreme canvas that is shaped and transformed into a sublime source of inspiration. The eerie red color works as faded passions: a river of abstract dreamy thoughts and associations of our existence.

by Octavio Carbajal González