Jun. 20, 2012 - Issue #870: Food Trucks
Red Desert
Red Desert's altered world
Guiliana (Monica Vitti) enters this landscape with her son wearing fuzzy coats of green and orange so vivid they seem otherworldly. Giuliana approaches a stranger lunching near the site of a strike and pleads with him to buy his already half-eaten sandwich. She then scurries off to consume the sandwich ravenously, and in private, like a wounded animal. Giuliana's husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) works for the company who erected those spectral chemical plants. Ugo expresses concern for Giuliana, who has recently survived an auto accident, yet he seems incapable of dealing with her hysteria. Along comes Corrado (Richard Harris), a fellow industrialist consulting Ugo in his search for workers to take to Patagonia. Corrado is undergoing his own existential crisis and seems drawn to Giuliana. He tells her he keeps moving around, yet feels out of place everywhere he goes. (He's embodied, rather fittingly, by an Irishman, though he's meant to be Italian.) Does he really relate to her? Or does he simply find her vulnerability appealing, perhaps erotically inviting? Among the most fascinating elements in Red Desert is Giuliana's slow emergence as its most powerful character. She may be paranoid and neurotic, almost childlike in Vitti's timid, occasionally playful performance, but where Corrado waxes philosophical and romanticizes his loneliness, it's Giuliana who genuinely searches, urgently scouring the world of Red Desert for some place where she won't feel as unmoored as the cargo ships that continually slide into frame and haunted by the electronic drones that permeate the soundtrack.
In Red Desert, landscape possesses an overwhelming influence on the human psyche. The film's images of environmental devastation are not lamentations—they're far too esthetically charged, drawing upon the work of painters such as Morandi, Pollock and Rothko. This wintry post-natural world is observed without sentiment. How its landscape effects the characters, or rather, how it's already effected the characters without their knowing, is the essential subject. Red Desert capitalizes on the sense of modern alienation and bourgeois repression cultivated in Antonioni's preceding trilogy of L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). This lineage is most apparent in the famous sequence where Giuliana, Ugo, Corrado and three others partake in a failed orgy in a seaside hut. Yet this film, richly detailed, mysterious, and hypnotic, takes a bold step forward, advancing on Antonioni's established themes and style, not only in its distinctive audiovisual design, which looks forward to David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976) or the ecologically themed photography of Edward Burtynsky, amongst many other important works of art, but also in its almost perverse pushing of the boundaries of drama.
Metro Cinema at the Garneau
Originally Released: 1964
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