Review of Red Desert (1964) by Patric C — 18 Sep 2011

"There's something terrible about reality and I don't know what it is." So Giuliana, the scared character played by Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film, moans.

She is a human being trapped in a world of robots, and she cannot seem to connect with anybody aside from her son, a boy who still contains the childlike innocence needed to ask the questions she is most scared to: Why and How? Antonioni was always best at capturing feelings, the inexplicable ones we all feel from time to time without knowing how to deal with them.

This is a film about that feeling of dread, the moment of panic we feel when we think for a moment that our dreams and our future may not line up, that what we're doing has no set plan and that every coming second might bring pain and disaster.

We discover that Giuliana was in an accident, a serious one, and that it was the start of her problems, as if it tore a hole in the fence that is comfort and safety and gave her a long, hard look at reality.

Antonioni accomplishes a bold feeling of dread by carefully intertwining a stunning color palette and a trained lens which chooses very carefully it's focal points; some of the best shots in the film leave humans fuzzy and pick up a single flower in perfect focus.

This is, without a doubt, one of the five most beautiful looking films I have ever seen. The performances by Vitti and Richard Harris are just right for an Antonioni film; they are nuanced and delicate, as far away from theatrical ones as possible.

At their most reserved they are explosive. Antonioni made a handful of good films in the 1960s, but this stands as one of his most gripping and beautiful.