Red Desert

Red Desert – Giuliana, played by the beautiful Monica Vitti, has a serious problem in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 Red Desert. She is suffering from a protracted and dire nervous breakdown. As she melts into tears, or quivers with anxiety, men rush to comfort her. Unfortunately, their comforting embraces inevitably mutate into caresses and sexual invitations. This is really not what our heroine wants or needs as her world falls apart around her. Antonioni shot The Red Desert in color – it was his first Technicolor film – and the picture is fantastically, eerily beautiful. Giuliana’s husband, Ugo, is some kind of chemical engineer and the picture is largely comprised of wide-screen industrial landscapes through which the hapless and disconsolate heroine wanders. It’s easy to make fun of Antonioni and The Red Desert is so mannered and oblique as to seem, at times, a kind of humorless self-parody – Antonioni imitating all of his own worst tics and mannerisms. And, yet, the film is so spectacularly beautiful, the landscapes so jaw-droppingly unearthly, that the visual aspects of the film assume an authority and desolate gravitas that seems to justify the accumulated banalities and implausibilities of the story-line. Antonioni places the viewer in a no-man’s land – half-way between objective reality and Giuliana’s deranged, hallucinatory vision of the menacing industrial terrain around her. You are never certain whether you are seeing the blighted world as she sees it, or whether the visions and dream-like vistas that she encounters are actually and objectively present. To further confound the viewer, Antonioni ruptures continuity – the film cuts from one sequence to another without any cues except changes in Monica Vitti’s wardrobe. Sometimes, she has a small angelic boy in tow with her – but, then, suddenly, and without warning he is gone, creating considerable anxiety in the audience: has she forgotten him or abandoned him or is Antonioni simply so negligent in maintaining continuity that he has decided to precipitously drop the kid from the film? (The truth is usually a combination of these things.) As often the case with Antonioni, there are gestures at some kind of a plot – Vitti is tempted to adultery with a handsome personnel recruiter (Richard Harris) and there are vague references to that character trying to hire men to work in Patagonia. This subplot seems to have something to do with Giuliana’s fear of being abandoned. The little boy develops alarming symptoms of paralysis which are, probably, feigned. A ship docks at a foggy pier and raises a yellow flag, thought to signify contagion on board. Later, in the film’s justly famous final scene, we are shown tall smokestacks unscrolling pennants of vividly yellow smoke. The smoke is said to be toxic, but as Giuliana assures her little boy, the “birdies know not fly into it.” In other words, they are adapted to the lethal “burning marl” of the industrial wastelands, something that the heroine incapable of. At one point, in a sequence that seems lifted from another movie, the principal characters – this being an Italian film after all – gather for an orgy in a bizarre hut with red-painted walls . But, this being an Italian art film after all, they forget their sexual ambitions and end up sulking in the toxic mist. Giuliana lives in a house that is as comfortless and hyper-modern as a pesticide factory. Their village is empty and Antonioni has painted all of its surfaces, including a cart of vegetable and fruit produce, a dull, industrial grey. Antonioni makes his points with clumsy emphasis – instead of a pet, the little boy has a life-size robot with glowing eyes, that stands sentinel at his bedside. It’s easy to mock the pretensions and affectations of this film, but the imagery is truly extraordinary. The landscape is part rotting and polluted water and part salt marsh – huge ships glide between sepulchral columns of blackened trees. The vivid rust stains on the metal sides of the huge vessels make them into vast Abstract Expressionist canvasses: they glow like paintings by Jackson Pollock or, even, more brightly, like vast abstractions by Gerhardt Richter. There are images of staggering beauty and violence – at one point, a colossal roiling cloud of steam inexplicably pours outside of a factory, dwarfing the characters and jetting debris high into the air. The edges of the canals and the fields are charred and seething with plumes of poisonous smoke – it is as if the factories are built on seared volcanic lava. And Antonioni’s reaction to these landscapes is clearly very complex – it is 1964 and this industry is dragging Italy, as if by her hair, out of desperate poverty. Clearly, Antonioni admires his technocrats and their monstrous factories. And, it is equally clear, that he is fascinated, even, hypnotized by the strange, uncanny beauty of these places – the iron struts and pipes, the vast eyeless walls, the hissing plumes of poison. But, of course, he is also appalled, although it would be a mistake to interpret the film as a screed against industrialization and pollution. The final image encapsulates all of these contradictions: it is an amazing spectacle of brilliantly colored poisons spewing from huge, dramatic scaffoldings of pipe and smokestack into a sky that would be naturally drab and colorless without the lethal brushstrokes that industry has made against the heavens.