Red Desert
Before I saw at the British Film Institute earlier in the week, was the only film I'd seen by Michelangelo Antonioni. I'd been put off by the self-conscious cool of Blowup and didn't seek out work by the director after that. Red Desert is a very different film, however. Antonioni's first in colour, it stars Monica Vitti (the protagonist in several of the director's films of the time) as Giuliana, a woman who appears vulnerable and disturbed.
Monica Vitti and Richard Harris in Red Desert. Picture courtesy the BFI
Drifting through a life centred on her husband and young son she meets a business associate of her husband, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), and they are drawn to each other. What threatens to turn into the tale of a neurotic woman rescued by romance is actually much more complicated that that. By the end of the film the accommodation Giuliana comes to with her world is of her own devising.
Monica Vitti and Richard Harris are both very good (Harris despite some terrible dubbing) but the most striking thing about the film is the depiction of a landscape transformed by man. Much of the action takes place around the factory where Giuliana's husband works, in their sterile apartment and in the polluted landscape of industrial Ravenna. Despite the modern temptation to interpret the film as a work of impassioned environmentalism, Antonioni himself was resistant to this view. In an he claimed that he wished to capture the beauty of these artificial surroundings, "The line, the curves of factories and their smoke-stacks, are perhaps more beautiful than a row of trees". Whatever our reaction to polluted rivers and piles of rubbish, the tragedy of Guiliana's inability to adjust to this environment is very poignant. Before the screening of Red Desert, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith gave a short presentation about the film in which he drew a parallel between the density of colour used by Antonioni in the film and that of his close friend at the time, Mark Rothko. It's an interesting point, and one that we are in a unique place to consider with the currently at Tate Modern. A restored version of Red Desert was released on DVD and Blu-ray at the end of last month.
Comments