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.

There is a place in modern civilization that I find more horrible than any nightmare mankind has ever created before, except maybe the holocaust. It's exactly those soulless, faceless industrial compounds that dump toxic waste into the ground and poisonous fumes into the air. Whenever I see them in real life, my heart sinks. It's the ugly backbone of human progress, I guess.Il deserto rosso is a very thoroughly replica of this nightmare. The film makes us look at it for two hours from all imaginable angles. To make the disheartening effect even stronger, it shows us a group of people who seem to have adapted to live in such an environment, or maybe were oblivious of it from the beginning. It's actually very simple to survive in a dehumanized place: you just have to dehumanize yourself. If you don't, you might end up like Guliana.She's the main character, played by Monica Vitti, and seems to be the only one affected by her surroundings. She almost cannot deal with it. Her symptoms of anxiety and depression seem to stem from an accident she had earlier, while it is unclear whether the accident was the cause or the effect of her despair. She feels attraction for a drifting coworker of her husband, because they both dream of escape. An escape that only seems possible in her imagination, as depicted in the one sequence of the film that is not utterly hopeless: the young girl on the beach.I find this film really hard to rate. The cinematography is superior. I still see Guliana's green coat against the background of the grayish industrial plant and the dark vegetation. It's also totally depressing. It points a finger at the chimera we have created, but does just that, in highly composed imagery. Some viewers can abstract these things in their brains and therefore be detached, some might find that complying with an empty existence equals „hope". For me, it was a bit too close for comfort.

Having now seen Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Aventurra trilogy and his fourth film focusing on themes of alienation and isolation, I must say that the point has been made. In these modern times (1960s for Antonioni), man is virtually alone, without any form of support, help or care. This is by far the most depressing lesson the movies have ever taught me, and yet I seem to not care so much if only because I feel I do not agree with Antonioni nor am I interested in seeing a film on this subject again. Granted, this is certainly one of the most beautiful films ever made, comparable to Days of Heaven and Barry Lyndon. Nevertheless, despite its great ambitions to capture the existence of humanity amidst a backdrop of industry, dirt and noise, I cannot help but feel almost cold and indifferent. This has been a problem of mine since La Notte, which by itself had some merits as it explored deeply the reasons for which marriages disintegrate. L'eclisse, by contrast was terribly slow-paced, incredibly languid in its story and quite ambiguous in its message. All of this is fine; unless of course the director intends to send a clear message.I have no doubt Antonioni intended with these four films to capture the very mood in which most people felt in the 1960s and I feel he succeeded brilliantly... with L'Aventurra. By contrast, these next three films simply labor the point. Sure, they are different in exact plotting and setting but they all feature the same actress, Monica Vitti with her stunning but remarkably cold eyes, and desolate settings meant to convey to the audience the feelings of the characters. This is all fine but is it really necessary to say essentially the same thing four times in a row? Many will say yes but for me to see L'Aventurra was enough. That was a beautiful, moving, emotional film about these heavy themes. The same cannot be said for the subsequent three.

"There's something terrible in reality," Guiliana (Monica Viti) tells Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) towards the end of the film. This statement encapsulates Viti's character perfectly. Guiliana is withdrawn, has bouts of anxiety and paranoia. She had previously been in a car accident involving a van and been hospitalised for a year with serious shock. This role is played beautifully by Viti (who had collaborated with Antonioni on his three previous films); whilst she strikes the occasional contorted pose, she uses her eyes majestically to portray a fractured, anxious thought process. If her eyes are not frantically darting around, encapsulating immaculate confusion, then they are sunken, glacial, and permeated with sadness.Guiliana is married, but on meeting her, Corrado seems almost infatuated with her awkward, unstable demeanour. They enter into a subdued affair that is restrained by her seemingly perpetual elusiveness. She is haunted by details - that we have no awareness - of the road accident. It could also be argued that Guiliana is affected by the surroundings she inhabits. The film is set in Ravenna, an industrialised, bleak landscape of factories; chimneys pumping out fumes, infecting the horizon with a dense fog. All that is left of the natural surroundings of field and trees, is the bare-bones of rotten, forgotten husks. The once-green grass churned into slurry. The infected waters, yellow and frothing as the waves hit the poisonous rocks.This was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in colour. The last in a loose tetralogy informed with themes of alienation in the modern, industrialised world. Red Desert was preceded by L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). Whilst much of the landscape filmed here, the overall effect of the visuals is astonishingly beautiful. These stark, brooding images stay with you. Whilst the natural colours (dissipated by the onslaught of industrial waste infecting the air) are washed out by heavy pollution, Antonioni lightly daubs his mise-en-scene with slight painterly strokes of colour (often out-of-focus) across the composition with a mass-produced object of manufactured descent.The theme of the relationship between the polluting element of the manufacturing industry with human emotion is open to interpretation in this film. Do we see these objects of consumerist desires that illuminate the screen with their intensely garish, gauche, fabricated colours, as the fundamental fascination with the industrial age? Are we, like Guiliana, so totally absorbed by our modernist surroundings that we find solace in the objects that this modern industrial age has produced? Any film that is open to new ideas excites me. A film that can be represented with new adaptation of thought. Our understanding of technology, and the changing face of industrialisation/globalisation will undoubtedly change, as I am sure will the interpretations of this beautifully constructed piece of cinema/art.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com