Red Desert

Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni

1964

****

In 1964, the revered Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni set out to make a film that condemned the oppression of industrialism on modern life, as well as address its aspects of beauty. He wanted to paint the world the way you would an oil painting, so following the stunning L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse he finally moved to colour. Antonioni suggested that his intention with Il deserto rosso (Red Desert) was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable. The neurosis he sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date. So quite why he cast an Englishman who couldn’t speak a word of Italian in an Italian film is anyone’s guess. Quite how Antonioni would approach the use of colour was unclear but I personally think the opening scene is about as iconic of the 60s as cinema gets. In Ravenna, Italy, Giuliana (Monica Vitti) walks with her young son, Valerio, towards the petrochemical plant managed by her husband, Ugo. Passing workers who are on strike, Giuliana nervously and impulsively purchases a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers. They are surrounded by strange industrial structures and debris that create inhuman images and sounds. Inside the plant, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) is talking with a visiting business associate, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), who is looking to recruit workers for an industrial operation in Patagonia, Argentina. Ugo and Corrado converse comfortably in the noisy factory. Ugo tells Corrado that his wife, Giuliana, was recently involved in a car crash, and though she was physically unhurt, she has not been right mentally. That night in their apartment, Giuliana becomes highly agitated and fearful over a dream she had about sinking in quicksand. Ugo is unable to calm her or understand what she's experiencing. Attracted to Giuliana, Corrado visits her at an empty shop she's planning to open and talks about his life and the restless nature of his existence. She accompanies him to Ferrara on one of his worker recruitment drives, and she indirectly reveals details about her mental state. She tells him that when she was in the hospital, she met a young woman patient who was advised by her doctors to find someone or something to love, whether it be a husband, a son, a job, or even a dog. She speaks of the young woman feeling like there was "no ground beneath her, like she was sliding down a slope, sinking, always on the verge of drowning." They travel to a radio observatory in Medicina, where Corrado hopes to recruit a top worker. Surrounded by cold industrial architecture, Giuliana seems lost in her loneliness and isolation. The following weekend, Giuliana, Ugo, and Corrado are walking beside a polluted estuary where they meet up with another couple, Max and Linda, and together they drive to a small riverside shack at Porto Corsini where they meet Emilia. They spend time in the shack engaged in trivial small talk filled with jokes, role-playing, and sexual innuendo. Giuliana seems to find temporary solace in these mindless distractions. A mysterious ship docks directly outside their shack, and as she looks out to the open sea, Giuliana confides to Corrado, "I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land." During their conversations, Corrado and Giuliana have grown closer, and he shows interest and sympathy for her. Like Giuliana, Corrado is also alienated, but he is better adapted to and accepting of his environment, telling her, "You wonder what to look at; I wonder how to live." When a doctor arrives to board the ship, Giuliana, seeing that the ship is now quarantined due to an infectious disease, rushes off in a state of panic. Her unwillingness to stay, or to return to the shack to retrieve the purse she left behind, underscores her state of alienation from the others. Sometime later, Ugo leaves on a business trip, and Giuliana spends more time with Corrado, revealing more about her anxieties. One day she discovers that her son has apparently become suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. Fearing he has contracted polio, Giuliana tries to comfort her son with a story about a young girl who lives on an island and swims off a beach at an isolated cove. The girl is at home with her surroundings, but after a mysterious sailing ship approaches offshore, all the rocks of the cove seem to come alive and sing to her in one voice. Soon after, Giuliana discovers to her shock that Valerio was only pretending to be paralyzed. Unable to imagine why her son would do such a cruel thing, Guiliana's sense of loneliness and isolation returns. Desperate to end her inner turmoil, Giuliana goes to Corrado's apartment where he tries to force his affections on her. Initially resisting Corrado's advances, Giuliana eventually accepts his affections, and the two make love in his bed. The intimacy, however, does little to relieve Giuliana's sense of isolation. The next day, a distraught Giuliana leaves Corrado and wanders to a dockside ship where she meets a foreign sailor and tries to communicate her feelings to him, but he cannot understand her words. Acknowledging the reality of her isolation, she says, "We are all separate." At that point, Giuliana seems to be completely alone and at her lowest state. Sometime later, Giuliana is again walking with her son near her husband's plant. Valerio notices a nearby smokestack emitting poisonous yellow smoke and wonders if birds are being killed by the toxic emissions. Giuliana tells him that the birds have learned not to fly near the poisonous yellow smoke. It’s about as colourful as depression has ever looked. The cinematography is highlighted by pastel colors with flowing white smoke and fog. The sound design blends a foley of industrial and urban sounds with ghostly ship horns and an abstract electronic music score by Gianluigi Gelmetti. Antonioni said “I want to paint the film as one paints the canvas; I want to invent the colour relationships, and not limit myself to photographing only natural colours.” And that is what he did going to such great lengths in reaching this goal, even having trees and grass painted white or grey to fit his take on an urban landscape. Personally, as much as I enjoyed the visuals and mysteriousness of Antonioni’s films, I can’t help but think he let his own indulgences take over. This was back when directors would over run by months, all such directors are now known as geniuses but I’ve always thought that a truly great director keeps to schedule and knows what they’re going to film before the cameras are switched on. I find the use of the industrial world as a metaphor, or indeed, as the architecture of anxiety, quite interesting but as the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky said of the film, Antonioni had gotten "high on pictorial aesthetics" at the expense of story and clarity. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during filming though. While making this film on-location in Italy, Richard Harris experimented with LSD for the first time. He was caught climbing the Trevi fountain in Rome, and then ended up locked in a hotel bathroom, smashing the mirrors to smithereens with his bare fists. David Hemmings claimed in his autobiography, that Richard Harris was kicked off the film after he punched Antonioni, and that the scenes that were still to be completed, were done with another actor who was photographed from behind. Hemmings was apparently told this when Harris warned him about Antonioni when Hemmings was working on Blow-Up just a few years later.