Antonioni spiritually enters the 60s with this fascinating experimental movie about the malaise of industrial society
Michelangelo Antonioni's sensational break with a more conventional past famously came with L'Avventura in 1960, but here in 1964, with his first colour movie (now re-released for the director's centenary) was where the Antonioni 60s really began. It's not swinging exactly, but has a distinctively experimental, exploratory and even improvisatory feel. Red Desert is a disturbing ambient drama about post-natal anxiety and the malaise of industrial society: a deeply depressed young mother Giuliana (Monica Vitti), whose husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) runs a factory, finds herself drawn to Ugo's handsome associate Corrado (Richard Harris). who arrived to recruit a workforce for a mining adventure in south America. The landscape is a grim, sludgy mass of churned soil and dark satanic mills, belching out smoke and flame: Antonioni boldly counters the picturesque view of sunny, happy Italy. With its long takes and strange, electronic music, it looks eerily like a sci-fi movie, set on an alien world, an interplanetary colonial outpost, where sensitive earthlings have to swallow their distaste for their surroundings and think about the profits: this is a film to set alongside Alphaville or Solaris. When Guiliana in her green coat, with her little boy, wanders listlessly into view, she looks as if she has been colourised in a black-and-white film. She has suffered some kind of breakdown after being hospitalised after a car accident, and the film intuits some of her dislocation and alienation: Red Desert was perhaps an inspiration for Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (2008), though the spark for it can be seen in Antonioni's portmanteau film I Vinti, or The Vanquished (1953) in which a cigarette smuggler suffers a head injury on the run from customs and begins to see things in a woozy way. What a mysterious film it is, with much to perplex and even exasperate, but much to fascinate as well.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/26/red-desert-review
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