Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Il deserto rosso”, “Red Desert” (1964) Review
“ There’s something terrible about reality, and I don’t know what it is.”
Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first foray into full-color cinema, is my first introduction to his work. A feast for the senses, Red Desert is equal parts tragic and alluring, a cinematic feat that, in a technical sense, largely holds up over fifty years later. Set against the backdrop of a hellscape of industrial innovation, the film follows Giuliana (played by the fantastic Monica Vitti), a factory owner’s wife who is ailed by an ambiguous ‘sickness’ after an accident that manifests in the form of hysterical episodes, leaving her unmoored and haunted by a sense of alienation and loneliness that she can’t seem to understand.
The film opens to shots of industrial plants shooting massive plumes of smoke and flames into the sky, paired with the sounds of the machinery and an eerie, unsettling singer vocalizing. The sound design blends a dark and electronic instrumental with strange, dissonant noises of machinery, ringing and pounding and buzzing and whirring, sputtering and hissing in turn, an unnerving mix of sound that doesn’t let up until almost fifteen minutes into the film, forcibly immersing the viewer into Giuliana’s world. This is a landscape stripped of the color and beauty of the natural world, the dystopian atmosphere reminiscent of sci-fi films — a resemblance that’s strengthened by establishing shots that frame the human subjects as diminutive compared to the oppressive, hulking masses of industrial infrastructure around them.
This industrial hell is a setting that many inhabitants may not be happy with — as seen by striking factory employees encouraging a fellow worker to strike with them in the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the film — but it’s one they must assimilate into, a point that’s emphasized when the worker ignoring the strikers and heads towards the factory. It’s here that we meet Giuliana, and see right away that she doesn’t belong here. The shallow-focus shot showing Giuliana in her green peacoat—the one clear point of focus among dozens of blurry, desaturated people— sets her firmly and instantly apart from the people around her.
Herein lies the core of Giuliana’s conflict; she is alone, unmoored, unable to understand this world around her, which is in turn unable to understand her. She wanders around behaving bizarrely, buying a half-eaten sandwich from a man with far too much money before shuffling off to eat it. Vitti is by far the only notable cast performance of the film, and although every so often she veers heavily toward melodrama, it works in the context of her character, a deeply emotional and unstable woman. Here, her portrayal of Giuliana shines; she has an animal-like quality to her as she scurries into the wooded area, casting her gaze side-to-side as she nibbles on her sandwich. It conjures up a mental image of a gazelle that was dropped into a wasteland as the camera cuts between shots of Giuliana eating with tree branches and the factory shooting flames in the air behind her, and point-of-view shots panning over the ground, where unidentifiable bits of machinery and plastic are covered in a black oily substance.
Antonioni’s use of color is masterful, with bright colors taking on a muted quality as they reflect Giuliana’s disquietude with her surroundings, and desaturated colors dominating the landscape. In some of the opening shots, this contrast is so severe it almost looks as though the background is in black and white and Giuliana is the only spot of color. Only one sequence is highly saturated: the beach story sequence. The shots of the beach are in full, vibrant color as Giuliana reads the story to her son in a sorrowful, longing tone. As Giuliana wistfully describes youth, freedom and an uncomplicated physical connection to the natural world, the scene spills across the screen in dreamy, colorful shots. Giuliana is reverent as she narrates, and the scene matches her reverence, silent save for the gentle sounds of her voice over birdsong and water lapping the shore. The scene is beautiful, overhead establishing shots depicting the beach’s “crystal clear water and pink sand” as the clean, pure and natural heaven to the the industrial world’s gritty manmade hell. The vocalization of the female singer, which was eerie and dissonant over the factory sounds, now rings clear and beautiful with nothing but the sound of the ocean to accompany it.
It is in the telling of this story that we understand the inherent tragedy of Giuliana’s circumstances. Giuliana embodies the soul of Romanticism, a nineteenth century movement that was born in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. She reels against the incessant hurtle of humanity towards modernism and conventionality, placing higher value on connecting to the natural world and seeking individuality. Everything she represents is emphasized by the Romantic movement; a longing for the natural world, a strong sense of nostalgia for the freedom of her youth, a deeply emotional core, a strong sense of individualism. There’s a rigid dichotomy between the reality she aches for and the one she lives in, and it fractures her mind. In becoming a factory owner’s wife, and a mother, she loses everything that matters to her, and she goes mad with grief and existential uncertainty. What could be worse for a Romantic than to be thrust into an ecological wasteland where their youth is gone and they only exist in relation to others (somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife)? Giuliana loves her family, yet she longs to exist within herself and outside of them, a dilemma she tries to explain to the sailor while she grapples between familial duty and self actualization.
“I can’t decide… because I’m not a single woman. Though sometimes, I feel sort of… separated. No, not from my husband. Our bodies are all separate. If you prick me, you don’t suffer.”
It’s this longing and uncertainty that lead Giuliana to seek an escape in her husband’s friend Corrado (played by Richard Harris), who is instantly taken with Giuliana upon meeting her. This affair works as a distraction for a bit, but it’s clearly headed for destruction as we see Corrado continuously brush off her illness and her feelings. He has very little patience for the difficult parts of Giuliana, and she is emotionally adrift more often than she is present. In the most heartbreaking sequence of the film, Giuliana, thrust into the depths of a profound sadness and emotional turbulence after telling her son the story of the beach, seeks Corrado out. She’s distressed, asserting that he doesn’t love her and lamenting her instability and loneliness in a gutting display of vulnerability.
“I don’t even know myself. I never get enough. Why must I always need other people? I must be an idiot. That’s why I can’t seem to manage. You know what I’d like? I’d like everyone who ever cared about me, here around me now, like a wall.”
Giuliana is at her lowest, desperately in need of human connection and support, and Corrado, whose entire narrative purpose seems to be to showcase how useless and self-serving a single person can manage to be, brushes her off, sending her deeper into the depths of her despair.
(trigger warning for the next paragraph: description of sexual assault)
It is then, when Giuliana is truly broken in the throes of her despair, mad with an inexplicable grief, moving about the room erratically in a frenzied attempt to escape the ringing in her ears, that Corrado commits a truly heinous and stomach turning act: he takes advantage of her insensible state and holds her down, undressing her as she writhes around in discomfort, pursuing her several times even after she gets out of his grasp. The closeup of his bare back, predatory and out of focus, was so harrowing I felt ill watching it.
This violation of Giuliana’s bodily autonomy underscores the story’s eventual violation of her emotional autonomy. Antonioni’s attitude towards Giuliana is largely ambivalent. Though he explores the depths and the nuance of Giuliana’s psyche and shows the Romantic beliefs at her emotional core, when she has the opportunity to escape, she chooses to stay for her family. Giuliana is the human, emotional answer to the world’s hurtle into modernity and technology, and by having her resign herself to her fate in the industrial wasteland, Antonioni seems to be saying that although we can oppose and rally against the ceaseless modernization of the Earth, eventually we all succumb to it.
“ I have to think that everything that happens to me is my life. That’s all.”
