Red Desert (1964)

I don't know why I'm so drawn to Michelangelo Antonioni's films. They're essentially plotless, very arty, and usually concern the listless musings of depressed rich people. I suppose they're about loneliness. In the six films of his I've seen, he consistently photographs people alone in a landscape. And nothing we do, not talking, fucking, fighting…can change the fact that we are all alone. Red Desert falls between two big hits in his career (at least on the art house circuit): The Eclipse and Blow Up , and I think hasn't received the proper amount of attention because of it. It's also his first film in color, and Technicolor at that. He was famous for doing crazy shit like painting entire forests grey, burning vast meadows because they looked too uniform, hand painting entire streets down to the last cobblestone (look at the frame above). The way he uses color in this to dramatize what is happening in a scene is breathtaking. No one composes a shot like Antonioni. In visual terms, his films stand alone…they are a standard for beauty that still seem ahead of their time. I had actually already seen this, about fifteen years ago. My reaction at the time was befuddlement mixed with a weak-in-the-knees feeling that I had just witnessed one of the most stunning looking movies I'd ever seen (there is a scene in this that is probably the most idyllic and ravishing passage in film history). Yet, I'm still befuddled, and a little more exasperated with the slow pacing. The goings-on concern the unhappy wife (Monica Vitti) of an industrialist who has an affair with one of his colleagues (a dubbed and confused looking Richard Harris), after which she is still unhappy. That's it. If Antonioni just strung together this vague story as an excuse to stage and photograph exquisite images, then I'm fine with that. People like to read a lot into his films, but like other directors whose films are commonly dissected (Welles, Lynch, Hitchcock…who was a big admirer), Antonioni himself was reluctant to admit to any symbolism. David Thomson compared his films to the beauty of watching a shifting sand dune. Maybe it's the loose ends, the mystery, that make me watch, and cause his films to linger in my mind. An elegant cryptogram.