"The present is always wanting, which makes it ugly, abhorrent and unendurable. The present is obsolete. The moment it lands in the present, the coveted future is poisoned by the toxic effluvia of the wasted past." – Zygmunt Bauman
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" opens with an out of focus shot. We're at an industrial estate, the earth poisonous, the sky toxic, factory fumes snaking their way up into the air. Fittingly, a man complains that his food tastes of petroleum. In interviews, Antonioni would call this the "malaise of progress".
A woman and child appear. Her name is Giuliana (Monica Vitti), and she is the wife of a factory worker. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that Giuliana is stuck in what Jean Paul Sartre called a state of "existential nausea". Having sustained minor injuries in a crash, Giuliana becomes hypersensitive. Now deeply attuned to the world around her, Giuliana begins to feel the suffocating pain of existence. "Reality" itself has become an invisible weight. It smothers and crushes.
But Giuliana resists. She puts on a brave face and does her assigned duties as a wife and mother. But it's no use. As sensitivity inexorably leads to alienation, Giuliana begins to isolate and shield herself from all stimulus. These unconscious acts of removal soon become conscious acts: Giuliana attempts suicide. Her attempts fail.
Antonioni's landscapes convey Giuliana's mental anguish. Every object denotes a threatening presence, every location emblematic of the poor girl's fragile psyche. Antonioni has Giuliana sit next to a tilted cart to convey her lack of balance, has her wear a tight coat to convey how besieged she feels, uses out of focus shots to emphasise that Giuliana is "out of sync" with everyone else, alternates between sound and silence to differentiate between Giuliana's comfort and pain, and has her paint her shop in "cool colours" to convey her attempts at "separating" herself from the "poison". And as always with Antonioni, how characters enter certain spaces, what these spaces are, and how they act and react within these spaces are essential to the story.
Unsurprisingly, those around Giuliana can't relate to her troubles. Extended set pieces (parties, group sex, financial conquests, other biochemical stimuli etc) highlight the ways in which man habitually shields himself from painful contemplation. But Giuliana removes herself from these indulgences: she sees people as pitiful desire-machines, always chasing nothing. Anhedonic, she grows disillusioned with nothing less than all human behaviour.
The only one to empathise with Giuliana's pain is Zeller (Richard Harris), another wounded existentialist. Typical of Antonioni's male characters, Zeller is rootless, travelling from place to place but never finding contentment. The two begin a subdued romance, but despite Zeller's attempts to get to the bottom of Giuliana's condition, nothing changes.
But though nothing changes, everything moves, almost imperceptibly. Antonioni's use of moving cargo ships, the juxtaposition between movement and tranquillity, past and present, modernity and poverty, all work together to create a unique aesthetic. This is not just Italy's post-war reality, but a new world order, an illusory neo-capitalism in which there exists endless production, endless motion, but progress itself is nowhere to be seen.
The film represents the acme of modernist minimalism, but is itself an exploration of the "trauma" of modernism. Antonioni is unconcerned about how social changes affect industrial workers and focuses instead on upwardly mobile "skilled workers" or middle managers of the "new world". The film is typically said to be about "alienation" and "ennui", but it's more about the ambivalence toward economic transformation, and how this transformation destroys feeling, exploits desires, makes love impossible and creates a world of only shared pretence. The title of Antonioni's film itself alludes to a lack of "eros" or "love". Giuliana's in a desert of red. A lack of human passion; mankind's future waning of affect.
Antonioni then gives us a wonderful sequence which encapsulates the themes of his film. Giuliana's son seems to have caught a strange disease. His legs don't work and she fears that he may be paralysed. "Tell me what's wrong!" Giuliana screams. But like Giuliana, the boy doesn't speak. He's unable to articulate his pain and so must suffer in silence. His pain private, his legs broken, the boy seems too weak to exist in this new world.
It's a simple bedtime story that cures Giuliana's son. She tells him of a girl who swims away and lives on a secluded island. She is happy alone, away from the world, here on this silent beach. But one day a ship visits. The girl finds the ship beautiful and mysterious. Seeing the beauty in man, the girl then begins to hear the rocks and island singing all around her. Cue reconnection; but of course the island and boat are a fantasy.
The film ends with two brilliant scenes. Giuliana, like Zeller, attempts to flee the world. She heads out to the docks and boards a ship. Like the lead in Antonioni's "The Passenger", she wants to get away. It's only in a moment of self-therapy, when she finally articulates her pain to a sailor (who doesn't speak her language and doesn't understand her), that Giuliana comes to some measure of, not just closure, but false connection. She then leaves the ship.
"Red Desert" ends with a coda that mirrors the film's introduction. In this scene, mother and son look on at the factory landscape. The boy asks his mother why the factory's smoke is yellow. She tells him that the smoke is poisonous. "Why doesn't it kill the birds?" he asks. The message is clear: Giuliana hasn't been cured, she's simply learnt to cope. And the birds? Some have adapted to the smoke, some avoid it altogether, but most nonchalantly breathe it in. The poison doesn't register. The world's flocks fly, blissfully unaware.
9.5/10 – Masterpiece. See "Safe" (1995) and "Cries and Whispers" (1972).
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" opens with an out of focus shot. We're at an industrial estate, the earth poisonous, the sky toxic, factory fumes snaking their way up into the air. Fittingly, a man complains that his food tastes of petroleum. In interviews, Antonioni would call this the "malaise of progress".
A woman and child appear. Her name is Giuliana (Monica Vitti), and she is the wife of a factory worker. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that Giuliana is stuck in what Jean Paul Sartre called a state of "existential nausea". Having sustained minor injuries in a crash, Giuliana becomes hypersensitive. Now deeply attuned to the world around her, Giuliana begins to feel the suffocating pain of existence. "Reality" itself has become an invisible weight. It smothers and crushes.
But Giuliana resists. She puts on a brave face and does her assigned duties as a wife and mother. But it's no use. As sensitivity inexorably leads to alienation, Giuliana begins to isolate and shield herself from all stimulus. These unconscious acts of removal soon become conscious acts: Giuliana attempts suicide. Her attempts fail.
Antonioni's landscapes convey Giuliana's mental anguish. Every object denotes a threatening presence, every location emblematic of the poor girl's fragile psyche. Antonioni has Giuliana sit next to a tilted cart to convey her lack of balance, has her wear a tight coat to convey how besieged she feels, uses out of focus shots to emphasise that Giuliana is "out of sync" with everyone else, alternates between sound and silence to differentiate between Giuliana's comfort and pain, and has her paint her shop in "cool colours" to convey her attempts at "separating" herself from the "poison". And as always with Antonioni, how characters enter certain spaces, what these spaces are, and how they act and react within these spaces are essential to the story.
Unsurprisingly, those around Giuliana can't relate to her troubles. Extended set pieces (parties, group sex, financial conquests, other biochemical stimuli etc) highlight the ways in which man habitually shields himself from painful contemplation. But Giuliana removes herself from these indulgences: she sees people as pitiful desire-machines, always chasing nothing. Anhedonic, she grows disillusioned with nothing less than all human behaviour.
The only one to empathise with Giuliana's pain is Zeller (Richard Harris), another wounded existentialist. Typical of Antonioni's male characters, Zeller is rootless, travelling from place to place but never finding contentment. The two begin a subdued romance, but despite Zeller's attempts to get to the bottom of Giuliana's condition, nothing changes.
But though nothing changes, everything moves, almost imperceptibly. Antonioni's use of moving cargo ships, the juxtaposition between movement and tranquillity, past and present, modernity and poverty, all work together to create a unique aesthetic. This is not just Italy's post-war reality, but a new world order, an illusory neo-capitalism in which there exists endless production, endless motion, but progress itself is nowhere to be seen.
The film represents the acme of modernist minimalism, but is itself an exploration of the "trauma" of modernism. Antonioni is unconcerned about how social changes affect industrial workers and focuses instead on upwardly mobile "skilled workers" or middle managers of the "new world". The film is typically said to be about "alienation" and "ennui", but it's more about the ambivalence toward economic transformation, and how this transformation destroys feeling, exploits desires, makes love impossible and creates a world of only shared pretence. The title of Antonioni's film itself alludes to a lack of "eros" or "love". Giuliana's in a desert of red. A lack of human passion; mankind's future waning of affect.
Antonioni then gives us a wonderful sequence which encapsulates the themes of his film. Giuliana's son seems to have caught a strange disease. His legs don't work and she fears that he may be paralysed. "Tell me what's wrong!" Giuliana screams. But like Giuliana, the boy doesn't speak. He's unable to articulate his pain and so must suffer in silence. His pain private, his legs broken, the boy seems too weak to exist in this new world.
It's a simple bedtime story that cures Giuliana's son. She tells him of a girl who swims away and lives on a secluded island. She is happy alone, away from the world, here on this silent beach. But one day a ship visits. The girl finds the ship beautiful and mysterious. Seeing the beauty in man, the girl then begins to hear the rocks and island singing all around her. Cue reconnection; but of course the island and boat are a fantasy.
The film ends with two brilliant scenes. Giuliana, like Zeller, attempts to flee the world. She heads out to the docks and boards a ship. Like the lead in Antonioni's "The Passenger", she wants to get away. It's only in a moment of self-therapy, when she finally articulates her pain to a sailor (who doesn't speak her language and doesn't understand her), that Giuliana comes to some measure of, not just closure, but false connection. She then leaves the ship.
"Red Desert" ends with a coda that mirrors the film's introduction. In this scene, mother and son look on at the factory landscape. The boy asks his mother why the factory's smoke is yellow. She tells him that the smoke is poisonous. "Why doesn't it kill the birds?" he asks. The message is clear: Giuliana hasn't been cured, she's simply learnt to cope. And the birds? Some have adapted to the smoke, some avoid it altogether, but most nonchalantly breathe it in. The poison doesn't register. The world's flocks fly, blissfully unaware.
9.5/10 – Masterpiece. See "Safe" (1995) and "Cries and Whispers" (1972).