It’s amazing what color can do for a film. All that was sterile and desolate in Michelangelo Antonioni’s prior black and white films seem to take on a more cryptic form in Red Desert, the Italian director’s first foray into color film. The film’s working title – Celeste e verde or Light Blue and Green – denotes the significance of color in this postmodern landmark and Antonioni makes spectacular use of his resources to utilize dull, pastel colors as a means to illustrate the film’s jarring atmosphere. Being Antonioni’s first color film, his approach in Desert is unique and experimental, but reminiscences back on familiar themes – isolation, modernization – from his earlier films.
We find the director breaking new ground that allows him to express these themes more cognitively than ever before – while L’eclisse was primarily dependent on its bleak cinematography, Desert gave Antonioni free reign to manipulate environments with color; having his crew coat the ground and surrounding debris with muted colors and spray-paint forests black are just two examples. It was all an incentive to emphasize a haunting, but beautiful industrial world, one that Antonioni held no qualms against, but was in fact fascinated by. In the opposite corner is his protagonist – played by muse Monica Vitti – who reacts aversely to this world and shields herself from the reality of her condition. What Antonioni seeks to convey most in this film is that Giuliana’s neurotic tendencies are indeed amplified by her stark surroundings, but the root of her maladies runs much deeper than the director lets on.
Vitti plays Giuliana, an unhinged housewife recently released from the hospital after a severe car accident – which we later learn was the result of an attempted suicide. She feels estranged from her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) a plant manager who is very much aligned with modernization and often dismisses Giuliana’s condition in order to make sexual advances. Giuliana’s anxiety also hampers her ability to connect with her son who, like his father, seems more inclined to adapt to industrialization than shun it. She's eventually introduced to Ugo’s partner Zeller (Richard Harris) who’s in Italy for business and appears to understand her troubles far more intuitively than her husband ever has. But what appears to be a budding romance on the surface for Giuliana and Zeller ultimately foreshadows their inability to communicate with each other.
There’s something deceptive, but compelling about the relationship that develops between Giuliana and Zeller. Although both manage their plights from two different ends of the spectrum, they relate in feeling alienated from the industrial world. We're able to discern that these two characters are at a compromising stage in their lives, yet neither is willing to compromise with the society they live in.
As the film progresses it becomes clear that both Giuliana and Zeller seek to avoid this bourgeoning society filled with factories and large scale manufacturers, but despite feeling so close to one another, there’s still some dissonance in their communication. Zeller, with all his machismo and fortitude, has successfully realized his fantasies of escape – he’s constantly traveling to recruit new workers from all over. This, however, is merely an illusion of escape, and by the end of the film Giuliana – who’s bound to the objects and people around her, thus incapable of escaping – realizes that she can no longer seek refuge in a man who’s just as crippled as she is.
Apparently Ingmar Bergman – one of my favorite directors of all time – detested Monica Vitti’s performance in this film, but amusingly enough I’d rank Vitti’s work in Desert alongside Ingrid Thulin’s best in any of his films, including The Silence. I suppose he found her a pinch too intense, but the most difficult aspect about playing neurotic characters is finding a balance between going too far and not going far enough. The mannerisms, ticks and nuances that comprise the standard unstable protagonist pose a complex challenge for actors; a single slipup could prompt a comically theatrical performance. But Vitti manages to circumvent caricature and achieve a remarkably understated portrayal of a woman inflicted with severe neurosis without taking things too far.
I suppose Desert can be interpreted as a grim social commentary on industrialization, but as I mentioned above, Antonioni actually loved the idea of progress and found factories beautiful – obviously they played a large role in inspiring the film's concept. The art direction only further confirms this; blurring out characters and placing objects in the foreground to insinuate the importance and potential of technology, etc. As for Giuliana’s cold reception to the modern world, Antonioni’s merely suggesting that many individuals – especially during the industrial revolution that was unfolding during this period – were unable to adapt to such a social metamorphosis and therefore were impaired psychologically. Giuliana is a representation of those who failed to make the transition from the natural world to the industrial one, and Vitti's performance encapsulates that demographic wonderfully.
8/10
