Red Desert (Deserto rosso). 1964. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

(7/3/00)

Antonioni's work frankly looks pretentious today. At least this one does. He is famous for being "enigmatic," but that seems to be a nice word for coy. He gives you the impression that his film is about something important and has a meaning, but he's not telling you what. That's how a viewing of Red Desert felt this time around. It could be that my eyes hurt, that I just felt so out of it generally and that I don't have patience anymore. Or that I just don't know how to read a film like this--don't know what to look for.

All that said, I must say that the film held my interest for long stretches. It was pretty absorbing for the most part. I was impressed with the color cinematography. It is, for the most part, quite subdued in its impression of a stark, industrialized landscape. It is supposed to be a mirror of the main character's subjective states. So there is at least one scene where there is bright green grass and a whole seqence where the main character tells her son a story about a girl who lived in a kind of island paradise, which is full of bright, richly saturated color.

But why do we have this story about the young, tanned girl who swims around this beautiful blue water? What purpose does it serve? Just to show how drab the landscape the characters inhabit really is? I don't know.

The main character in the film is named Giuliana. When we first see her she is out with her small son. She asks a worker (or a striking worker) if he will sell her his half-eaten sandwhich. This tells us that she is obviously a disturbed woman. We later see her acting "disturbed"--cringing and doing other odd things. But she seems normal at other times.

She wants to open a shop in town. Her husband disapproves of this, especially since she isn't quite sure of what she wants to sell. When she is in the rooms that she plans to make into this shop she seems like a normal person. When she is talking to a workman who is above her in some sort of a structure she seems like a normal person. Giuliana seems to want to be a part of the world, be really involved with it. She seems to be trapped in a stagnating existence.

There is a mining engineer named Corrado to whom Giuliana is attracted. Her son becomes paralyzed--or so it seems. Then Giuliana sees him walking. She then goes to Corrado's hotel room and makes love with him. I interpret this to indicate that her son was faking the paralysis and thus betrayed her. Her infidelity was a reaction to this betrayal.

There are a lot of ships in this film. We see them constantly and in the story Giuliana tells her son about the girl that lived in a kind of paradise this girl swims out towards a ship with no people on it. (Made me think of the Flying Dutchman.) The ship then turns and sails off. I think it went back the way it came. Giuliana goes to a ship at night and meets a strange sailor who keeps saying, "I love you." He says it in English which makes me think that the words were devoid of meaning.

Why all these images of ships? My best guess is that the ships represent a desire to go somewhere, to move on. They represent a spiritual mobility as well as a physical one.

When Giuliana went to Corrado's hotel room, I was surprised at how patient he was with this woman who was starting to sound pretty tiresome. Later, she tells him that he hadn't helped her, either.

I don't know what to think of a scene in which several couples get together in a shack and seem about to embark on an orgy. The film cuts away in a familiar manner, suggesting that they really do have the orgy, but I can't think of any reason why Antonioni would allude to that Hollywood custom and he certainly could have shown us something if he had wished to. Giuliana later remarks that this egg (?) that she had consumed really did make her want to make love and in context that made me think that they did not.

After she has the encounter with Corrado the walls in his hotel room supposedly change from white to pink. I missed that.

At the end of the film Giuliana's son asks her if birds don't get poisoned flying through the smoke from the smokestacks. She answers that they have learned to go around it. Now, this obviously refers to her life and the need to adapt to the conditions she lives in. But we don't (or I didn't) see this policy being carried out in her own life. I don't see anything to indicate that she is learning to cope more effectively with the circumstances of her life. (Well, maybe that she asserts herself by having a sexual encounter which she initiates, but that is certainly arguable.) Maybe it is that she has an insight which will be reflected in her behavior in the future. Once again, I don't know.

It is hard to even remember what happens in Red Desert. It sort of lulls you into a state and you participate, but at the end you find you don't remember the details very clearly. A lot of it went by me without me understanding it. But I certainly didn't find it as inaccessible as Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. I do wish that I could get deeper into this one.