Rote Wüste

I first saw this remarkable movie when I was about eighteen/nineteen, when it first showed in London. At the time I was blown away and must have bored people at parties for ages telling them it was the greatest film ever made and that they should all see it. As now I was less able to give a particularly coherent reason why they would enjoy it but could only pass on my enthusiasm. Watching it again today, it is not only amazing how much I remembered (not at all common for me) or that I still found it captivating and all involving but something else. Many have spoken of the use of colour and sound and referred to the polluting factories and the grey wasteland but what struck me was that the profound and lasting affect it had clearly had upon me. As I watched the film unfold with the juxtaposition of trees, wasteland and alienated characters, I saw before me the template for the way I still tend to view life and most certainly take photographs. For what it is worth then, this film appears to have been the very basis for the way I see the world. An astonishing claim and it has made me wonder at the power of cinema itself. Does everybody have a film that is their template for how they view 'reality'?

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 piece 'Red Desert' is, on the surface, a film that deals with the changing face of the world under rampant industrialisation, but far more than that it's a comment on alienation and human adaptability in such a society. Guiliana (played by Monica Vitti) is the wife of petroleum plant manager Ugo. She lives in a spacious, modern apartment with Ugo and their small son, but there's an undercurrent of instability in Guiliana's persona, a feeling of unease and angst that Monica Vitti exhibits in Guiliana's every action. Vitti's portrayal of Guiliana is one of a woman on the point of a nervous breakdown, always fidgeting, wringing her hands, looking at unease and full of angst and continually walking away from conversations, forcing others to follow her. The way her character hugs close to walls at every opportunity is allegorical of her need to be surrounded by friends, family and loved ones, claiming that she "is only ill when I'm alone". We find out that Guiliana had recently been in a car accident and had spent a month in hospital being treating for shock, but unbeknownst to Ugo, Guiliana isn't adjusting well after her accident, while her husband remains entirely oblivious. Into the frame comes Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), an engineer friend of Ugo on his way to set up a new petroleum plant in Patagonia. Zeller is a quiet, reserved man who, like Guiliana, is visibly at unease with his surroundings, however his life and work afford him the luxury of moving from place to place, while Guiliana feels increasingly trapped in her existence. Inexorably, Zeller and Guiliana are drawn to each other, Zeller recognising a kindred spirit of sorts and Guiliana casting out a cry for help that only Zeller is capable of recognising. The fact that Zeller picks up on this and is continually drawn to Guiliana, despite her unstable, demanding behaviour, immediately points to his attraction to her, but it's only after acting on his attraction that Guiliana comes to accept her station and encounters her defining realisation; people aren't cured, they adapt.

But it's not just Guiliana's life she has to adapt to, it's her surroundings, beautifully brought to screen in what was, quite surprisingly, Antonioni's first foray into colour. With a telephoto lens to flatten the perspective, framing scenes purposefully out of focus and the use of disarming long-cut shots, Antonioni paints a bleached and chemical picture of post-war Italy, an Italy that expanded into an industrial super-power at an alarming rate. Antonioni was so adamant about how this world should be presented that he insisted on painting trees, barrels, walls and even whole fields to ensure the results he envisioned. An extreme measure, certainly, but a welcome one as the stark, sterile greys of this industrial Italy, juxtaposed here and there with flourishes of artificial, man-made colour, are often brought to the forefront of the viewer's mind when at times the pacing and ambiguity of the narrative create a lull in interest. Those man-made colours provide another allegorical point, alluding to how the society of this industrial community has adapted to the bleak repetitiveness of the environment by injecting splashes of primary colour into their surroundings. One criticism that's easy to level at 'Red Desert' is that it's an entirely singular film - Guiliana is undoubtedly the protagonist of this piece, but everyone else, even the ambiguous love interest Zeller, appears on screen barely defined. This might be a problem for anyone expecting a traditional narrative, but that's not what 'Red Desert' is about. There's no real progression of story here, only the progression of Guiliana's mental state, everything else is quite incidental and as such, is not admitted entry into Antonioni's vision. It's this bold vision that provides the films defining hallmark; the wonderful cinematography that surrounds Monica Vitti's accomplished, if somewhat overwrought, performance.

In this, his first step away from moody black and white cinema, experimental filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni sets out to "paint with color," and he succeeds with spectacular effect. Each shot resonates with artistry, from the lingering, hazy landscapes to the more complex, structured confines of a factory warehouse. Magnificently well-composed, it truly is like a moving painting. Slow-moving, I should say, because the famed director isn't shy about letting the camera linger and roam. Often, we'll wander away from subjects at the end of their scene to follow a line of paint up the wall or trace a curve of pipes through the cement ceiling. This seems essential, as the light storytelling and rambling, philosophical dialog constantly relies on such subtleties to deliver a sense of deeper meaning. The scant plot, focused around a timid, depressed housewife and her struggle to come to terms with the sad state of her life, can be a tall ask at times because it's so excruciatingly glacier-paced and spiritually draining. The bleak, industrial setting - where billowing towers of man-made chemicals and haunting, noisy machinery are the rule of the day - contains loud metaphors for the character's internal conflict, but you'll have to look and dig to find them. Not an easy film to watch, it can be fascinating but also extremely demanding. I'd call it a mixed success. In terms of proving the medium as a legitimate art form, it's a roaring triumph. As an engaging narrative, it falls very short.

For the most part, I've never been terribly impressed by the "new wave" movements in the French and Italian cinema of the 1960s. How many times do we have to watch the upper middle class intelligentsia wallowing in their designer-alienated angst? And why don't those films ever bring up any mention of altruism? Perhaps those folks wouldn't feel so alienated if they got off their seats at the cafe, or on their yacht, and actually tried to participate in the world. Maybe they could help those who don't have the leisure to whine about their hardships in life. Or maybe they could even do something to counter the coldness and ugliness that surrounds them.

This film is different, because this time the isolation and coldness is real and tangible, and we are entrapped by it as much as the main character is. We can see the ugliness and filth sweeping over everything like a virus. And we can see how isolated one becomes when one discovers that s/he is the only one who seems to be sensitive to it. No one really sees or listens to Giuliana (including, I'm sorry to see, some of the commentators here at IMDb!). The people around her see her 'function' (wife, mother, sexy lady) but not her identity. I will admit that Monica Vitti isn't terrific in this. She gives a great 'performance', but it seems too much a performance. If she had been anything like Gena Rowlands in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, this film would be a masterpiece. As it stands, it's still an excellent film.

As for this film's use of colors... I heard once that if you drop a copper penny into a goldfish bowl, it will eventually drain all the color from the fish. I don't know if that's true, but that is what essentially has happened to the town that's depicted in this film (and sadly, thousands of similar places all over the globe). People have adapted. And real color has been drained out of everything. The only colors we see in the film are manmade. Thick, bright, glossy paint coats everything from walls to houses to the pipes in the factories. There are no natural colors that contain any real texture or sensuality or warmth. Even the "natural" elements look unreal. The land is riddled with greenish muck, the sea is coated with muddy oil, and the sky is choking in clouds of frightening yellow smoke. The painted colors that we see throughout the town function like pink pebbles in a dirty goldfish bowl. It is a distraction that rapes one's senses. It's like muzak in an elevator. And by the end of the film, like Giuliana, we are suffocating from it.

There's an incredible scene about two-thirds of the way through the film where we escape with Giuliana in her mind to a dream world. There, the colors radiate from the shimmering sea, and the sand and the sky. And the surrounding hills have more sensuality and texture than the people in Giuliana's real world. I'm glad that Antonioni gave us this image. This film is certainly depressing, yet it has balance. There are few places left on this planet like Giuliana's pastoral island. But the fact of that image gives us a glimmer of hope, like Winston Smith and his journal in '1984'. Even if the only beauty that exists is in our minds, that's something.

I think this is definitely Antonioni's best film. It isn't for all tastes, but then, the best films never are.

Usually, I see a film and comment on it. If it is one I have seen before, that comment has folds from my life and internal imagination. Every film I have seen builds that imagination in some way. A few are profound and some of those are knowingly so, either me or the film knowing.

I saw this a great many years ago, when visual wisdom was less familiar and it had a great impact on me. At that time, the intellectual economy was fueled by a sort of controlled French angst, formatted for digestibility by young college minds. It really was so. Malick was one in my vicinity who could master a meal made of this without excluding more nourishing things, but that is a different story than the one I want to tell.

I cannot recall the year, perhaps 1966, I saw this at the Orson Welles theater in Cambridge. Since then, I collect the sounds of waves on beaches. I've travelled widely and for some reason have a near perfect aural recall of each experience of the watered desert. It is my primary anchor to the forms of nature.

The shape of this film is an outer world, bleaker than anything Lynch has given us. It is a beast of form: factories that even today amaze me with their power. If this existed in Italy — which I have no doubt — then Soviet stuff is beyond my tolerance. Huge threatening forms seem created by gods to swallow color and thereby grow, engulfing everything. Within this we have a sole conscious mind succumbing. We drift, we succumb. The art here is homeopathic: we are given an experience in color that has power not in brilliance but in what is not there, what has already been swallowed. The cinematic vocabulary of form — three dimensional space — eating minds denoted by color... it is effective. This is Antonioni's greatest accomplishment, I believe.

Nested in this is an inner cinematic world, an island not yet visited by the diseased lumbering ships that spew clotted filth. It is just starting to be explored by a keen, clean sailing vessel. This is literally an island populated by a Miranda, the young, still vibrant inner self that remains of our on-screen body, the woman we have besieged in the outer film.

But this inner film is a contrast: color abounds. The forms do not contain, they rest. The colors have subdued and incorporated the forms that flow. In a subconscious way, these informed my life as an architect, first in form and later in more encompassing conceptual form. We have a newly adolescent girl on the beach, experiencing rather than observing. Her own inner form hinted at futures in the same way that the outer film's colors hinted at rich pasts.

And at about 1:22 in, we have those waves. The filmmaker has not only manipulated contrasts in color and form, but in the sound experience as well. At this inner beach, the sound is lush, hyper real. We have a few moments of the fullest life you can experience as we hear the smallish waves encounter the beach. May you enjoy and cherish these curated sounds.

In most beaches, each wave is shaped not by an encounter with the sand, land, but by an encounter with the preceding, receding wave, newly exhausted by its desires and reseeding a growing desire in the next. It is a water to water rhythm of desire that incidentally involves the form of the beach.

Not here. The waves are gentle enough to speak directly to the beach. We have not stirred the greater urges yet: the girl is young — as young as I was (being male). The caress of water on sand conveys the soft swallow of coarse sand, pillowing and sucking the water. A soft thump unlike anything else, that can only be evoked in memories as primal as taste: scotch, sex, sea air.

May you find something like this experience in your encounter with cinema, something to anchor the story you tell yourself about ideal order.

(That same beach is mapped onto a shack, outside to inside and painted red in the later images.)

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.