At times the poetic movement of the narrative in
The Red Desert
degenerates into incomprehensibility as if the esotericism echoes the
fears of the protagonist, Giuliana. Oblique dialogue, real-time sequences,
meandering camera views all serve to generate an incredible atmosphere of melancholia acuta
but at the same time baffle the viewer with
symbols that often trivialize the action, deaden the responses, and
further abstract the theme.
The visuals are beautiful. The landscape is usually the
geometrics of modern industry in Italy; the effect is to sectionize the
screen into various colors like an abstract painting, so that the
characters are constantly being isolated within a two-dimensional
reality.
Perhaps the most powerful scene is where Giuliana, Corrado, Ugo et. al.
emerge from the shack by the canal into the fog. The action here is pure
expressionism, where the fog becomes a catalyst for Giuliana's paranoia,
in which her husband and friends become mere phantoms beside the plague
ship. Confused and demented, she jumps into a car and drives to the end of
the wharf in an ambiguous gesture which might be attempted suicide... or,
as she claims, "a mistake".
The film reveals the awakening concern in the 60s for the ecology, and
in this sense Giuliana's malady is symbolic of this human blundering.
Antonioni is fond of using women in just such symbolic roles, eg. Anna in L'avventura (1960) or Jane in
Blow-Up (1967). In the
immediate sense, Giuliana's alienation is the primary theme but as a
universal, her 'madness' draws out the usual Antonioni preoccupation, what is reality?
The foreshortening effect of long range telephotography constantly
challenges our perception of the world: ships loom up suddenly, appear to
be moving through trees, fields... or pipes, wires, machinery, and walls
seem to merge. Rightly, the colors green and red have been celebrated by
critics as being the dominant color symbolisms, although gray and yellow
are often used to obvious advantage.
It's interesting to note what Antonioni himself has to say about his
style:
'Thus I have rid myself of much unnecessary technical baggage,
eliminating all the logical narrative transitions, all those connective
lines where one sequence served as a springboard for the one that
followed.
'The reason I did this was because it seemed to me -- and of this I am
firmly convinced -- that cinema today should be tied to the truth rather
than logic....' (from A Talk With Michelangelo Antonioni OnHis
Work, 1969)
I suppose one could be cruel and say that
The Red Desert simply
uses the cliche of sexual tension whereby the viewer is simply kept
waiting in an artsy-fartsy landscape until the inevitable coupling between
Corrado (Richard Harris) and Giuliana (Monica Vitti) takes place. In the
minimalist sense, that is the plot.
Yet the psychological interaction is interesting if only because what
follows each scene is unpredictable. Even the detour into a literal
dramatization of G.'s story to her son about the young girl swimming near
the rocks that "resembled flesh" holds our attention because by this point
we realize that G. reveals herself in the 3rd person. And as usual it
enhances the poetic movement through past and present, near and far, inner
and outer, further collapsing the spatial boundaries of her world and
ours.
Is Giuliana mad? Is she a sexual neurotic? "You can't imagine my
fears," she says to Corrado, the spiritual drifter who wonders "how to
live" and who mistakenly thinks he can find some salvation in his
fascination for the peculiar charms of this woman.
Or perhaps she is simply a victim of boredom: there is a hint of
decadence in the strange ritual with the eggs in the shack by the canal.
The suggestion of wife-swapping, group sex, etc is reminiscent of
Fellini's brilliant study of the jaded middle class misfits in La Dolce
Vita (1961). In the end, the philosophy we are offered is pure
romanticism: the world is sick because we are sick. The lament against
industrialization is familiar, as is the posture of self-hatred. Yet
withal there is a beauty in our pollution and perhaps as Giuliana says to
her son about the bird, we will learn not to "fly through the smoke".
From FCOURT
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