The Red Desert (12A.)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti, Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir and Aldo Grotti. 1964. Italian with subtitles.117 mins.
Il Deserto Rosso was Antonioni’s first film in colour and is an endearing study in the quaint alienation of the 1960s. It is set in the then rapidly industrialising Northern Italy, against a backdrop of state owned factories whose only purpose seems to be to belch out noise and pollution.
An engineer’s wife, Guilliana (Monica Vitti), is suffering some kind of nervous breakdown. This ugly new industrial world has disconnected her from reality. She spends a lot of time wandering lost through this landscape, always dressed immaculately and strikingly posed against factory walls, dockyards, pylons and polluted streams; the film is like an incredibly drab fashion shoot.
Red Desert is the pivotal point in Antonioni’s career, bridging his bourgeois alienation trilogy (l’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse) and his globetrotting colour escapades (Blow Up, Zabrieski’s Point, The Passenger.) After more than a decade working in black and white he takes on this new tool as if colour had been all his idea in the first place. Natural surfaces were often repainted so that they looked just so for the auteur.
Don’t go in expecting an orgy of bright colours; his was a more muted palette. It is still a feast for the eyes, though some of the other senses are less rewarded. With the best will in the world, there’s a certain talky pretentiousness to it that is hard to take.
It is though a lovely historical artefact, dated but beautifully dated. For example, there is a discordant electronic score by Vittorio Gelmetti that must have been terribly modish at the time but now sounds like the result of a drunken knees up at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Then there is the use of dubbed foreign actors, in this case the young Richard Harris. Casting him and then not letting him use that splendid voice is perverse but it does get you to notice how his head is a remarkably even symbiosis of Marlon Brando’s and Gordon Jackson’s.
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti, Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir and Aldo Grotti. 1964. Italian with subtitles.117 mins.
Il Deserto Rosso was Antonioni’s first film in colour and is an endearing study in the quaint alienation of the 1960s. It is set in the then rapidly industrialising Northern Italy, against a backdrop of state owned factories whose only purpose seems to be to belch out noise and pollution.
An engineer’s wife, Guilliana (Monica Vitti), is suffering some kind of nervous breakdown. This ugly new industrial world has disconnected her from reality. She spends a lot of time wandering lost through this landscape, always dressed immaculately and strikingly posed against factory walls, dockyards, pylons and polluted streams; the film is like an incredibly drab fashion shoot.
Red Desert is the pivotal point in Antonioni’s career, bridging his bourgeois alienation trilogy (l’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse) and his globetrotting colour escapades (Blow Up, Zabrieski’s Point, The Passenger.) After more than a decade working in black and white he takes on this new tool as if colour had been all his idea in the first place. Natural surfaces were often repainted so that they looked just so for the auteur.
Don’t go in expecting an orgy of bright colours; his was a more muted palette. It is still a feast for the eyes, though some of the other senses are less rewarded. With the best will in the world, there’s a certain talky pretentiousness to it that is hard to take.
It is though a lovely historical artefact, dated but beautifully dated. For example, there is a discordant electronic score by Vittorio Gelmetti that must have been terribly modish at the time but now sounds like the result of a drunken knees up at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Then there is the use of dubbed foreign actors, in this case the young Richard Harris. Casting him and then not letting him use that splendid voice is perverse but it does get you to notice how his head is a remarkably even symbiosis of Marlon Brando’s and Gordon Jackson’s.
