Sexylocher Masterful Movie

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Dujke1995 The main theme explored in works of a cinema master, Antonioni, and this one is no exception. I watched it 2 years ago. It was my first Antonioni, and didn't really liked it back then so I will not recommend it for entering into the artist work. But maybe it's just me. For entering I will recommend something like Zabriskie Point (my favorite from him) or The Passenger (my second).This is a film about woman (Monica Vitti), a very sensitive one, and beautiful too, living in her world, a very ugly and toxic, a distanced one, filmed with masterful directing and cinematography. It was a director's first colour movie and colours are beautifully placed in this harshly grey environment, especially red. Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse, was great in this film. She is my favourite actress, except maybe Irène Jacob, or maybe Juliette Binoche, or maybe... Well I don't know any Antonioni's movie with her in which she wasn't, at least, great.Don't get fooled because of my rating. I am very strict, very. This is one of Antonioni's best films for me and I will definitely watch it again in years to come.And please, be nicer to the environment.

gavin6942 Cold, rain, and fog surround a plant in Ravenna. Factory waste pollutes local lakes; hulking anonymous ships pass or dock and raise quarantine flags. Guiliana (Monica Vitti), a housewife married to the plant manager, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), is mentally ill, hiding it from her husband as best she can.This was director Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in color, which is appropriate given the title.While this not explicitly intended as political or social commentary, this interpretation is unavoidable when set in such a place as a dirty, lifeless factory. But do not assume that this landscape is necessarily bleak, as Antonioni has said of the film, "The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing." A bold statement.This was the fourth film Antonioni made with actress Monica Vitti, following "L'Avventura" (1960), "La Notte" (1961), and "L'Eclisse" (1962). Many critics consider this one her best work. Indeed, the audience can do nothing but flow with her emotions.

chaos-rampant I love Antonioni for these flickering realities. In Blowup he gave us memory as the chimera of the mind, the formation of human suffering. Going backwards to The Red Desert, I find that the mind hasn't been transcended yet, nonetheless we get a beautiful paradigm on the acceptance of that suffering as a fundamental condition of life. This is not an ultimate reality, but at least it's a first awareness of the appearance of suffering.We have the fragile, erratic, woman with the fractured soul as main character here, learning to be whole again. Only Bergman had done this before, but Through a Glass Darkly is literary and it pales when we see it next to the power of Antonioni's cinema. People like Polanski and Lynch would go on to make similar films with varying degrees of insanity permitted by surreal devices, moving them inside the fracture, the brilliance here is how the movie hops in and out of it, swapping and shaping realities.This is true first in the marvellous embedded story the mother narrates to her little boy, we see this unfold in her mind's eye (not the boy's). The island world there is peaceful and contained, sufficient and whole unto itself. Now and then mystery beckons and the girl in the story swims out to it, but she doesn't lose heart when it eludes her. It's in the nature of things to elude us. I like how these mysteries are vaguely poetic, a saiboat and an unseen song, as opposed to the violent omens encountered in David Lynch.I discover this again in the bedroom scene where Corrado coerces a shaken Guiliana into sex, a masterstroke by Antonioni because it's an uncomfortable coupling to see, yet not vulgar or perverse. Guiliana submits to the sexual advances, and for a moment the room turns inexplicably pink, like the sand in the island of her dreams. The wonderful ambiguity of this is that it's never apparent whether the fantasy is where she flees for safety or if she permits sex in order to reach it. But that flight into imagination lasts only for a while and does not change the world, the bedroom is still the same.I love how, with hardly any consideration or concession made to how a story ought to be explained, Antonioni sketches in a bleak barren landscape that serves as projection of tormented minds the traces of human souls aching for connection, seeking a unity of bodies that soothes in the yawning nothingness of the universe. He does not wait for a god to make his presence felt or perceive the defeaning silence as proof of damnation, but rather ushers his characters on a path towards self awareness.Guiliana's torment then begins with her false perception of the world. When she hears a scream that her husband didn't, she's shaken, desperate to prove it to herself, unsure if she did hear a scream after all. Outside the cabin, the mist hides her company from her eyes and she despairs more. In the mind's fixation to a world we think should be unchanging and always grasped, the world itself begins to fade.When they finally separate, Guiliana pushing him out because now she knows he can't help her, knowing also that the courage must come from inside and that she must not cling to things or people to get through the day, Corrado leaving with hardly a word, knowing at the same time that he can't help her either, it's like a firework of cinema.The final scene, where Guiliana explains to her son about the poisonous yellow smoke and how the birds have learned not to fly there, could be saying too much about her newfound awareness because we can infer it from the scene with the Turkish sailor, but I like how Antonioni bottles the sentiment in a gentle metaphor. As humans we may be swimming alone in a sea of suffering, but we can learn to tranquil the hand that makes it navigable.The one touch I have a hard time swallowing, is that Antonioni doesn't trust us to understand who the "girl in the hospital" was, making Monica Vitti tell us. Perhaps the film is enough of a drifting haze as it is and he wanted to drop an anchor there, to make at least something certain.It's the acceptance of suffering as part of life that matters here for me, how Antonioni makes cinema with it is only the masterstroke. As with films he made later, his cinema is spiritually important to me because conceptual understanding of ideas he presents or the appreciation of the visual vocabulary, which is rich in color and texture like few directors managed, cannot substitute for the final, tangible, experience of living through it all.

Yaaatoob Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 piece 'Red Desert' is, on the surface, a film that deals with the changing face of the world under rampant industrialisation, but far more than that it's a comment on alienation and human adaptability in such a society. Guiliana (played by Monica Vitti) is the wife of petroleum plant manager Ugo. She lives in a spacious, modern apartment with Ugo and their small son, but there's an undercurrent of instability in Guiliana's persona, a feeling of unease and angst that Monica Vitti exhibits in Guiliana's every action. Vitti's portrayal of Guiliana is one of a woman on the point of a nervous breakdown, always fidgeting, wringing her hands, looking at unease and full of angst and continually walking away from conversations, forcing others to follow her. The way her character hugs close to walls at every opportunity is allegorical of her need to be surrounded by friends, family and loved ones, claiming that she "is only ill when I'm alone". We find out that Guiliana had recently been in a car accident and had spent a month in hospital being treating for shock, but unbeknownst to Ugo, Guiliana isn't adjusting well after her accident, while her husband remains entirely oblivious. Into the frame comes Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), an engineer friend of Ugo on his way to set up a new petroleum plant in Patagonia. Zeller is a quiet, reserved man who, like Guiliana, is visibly at unease with his surroundings, however his life and work afford him the luxury of moving from place to place, while Guiliana feels increasingly trapped in her existence. Inexorably, Zeller and Guiliana are drawn to each other, Zeller recognising a kindred spirit of sorts and Guiliana casting out a cry for help that only Zeller is capable of recognising. The fact that Zeller picks up on this and is continually drawn to Guiliana, despite her unstable, demanding behaviour, immediately points to his attraction to her, but it's only after acting on his attraction that Guiliana comes to accept her station and encounters her defining realisation; people aren't cured, they adapt. But it's not just Guiliana's life she has to adapt to, it's her surroundings, beautifully brought to screen in what was, quite surprisingly, Antonioni's first foray into colour. With a telephoto lens to flatten the perspective, framing scenes purposefully out of focus and the use of disarming long-cut shots, Antonioni paints a bleached and chemical picture of post-war Italy, an Italy that expanded into an industrial super-power at an alarming rate. Antonioni was so adamant about how this world should be presented that he insisted on painting trees, barrels, walls and even whole fields to ensure the results he envisioned. An extreme measure, certainly, but a welcome one as the stark, sterile greys of this industrial Italy, juxtaposed here and there with flourishes of artificial, man-made colour, are often brought to the forefront of the viewer's mind when at times the pacing and ambiguity of the narrative create a lull in interest. Those man-made colours provide another allegorical point, alluding to how the society of this industrial community has adapted to the bleak repetitiveness of the environment by injecting splashes of primary colour into their surroundings. One criticism that's easy to level at 'Red Desert' is that it's an entirely singular film - Guiliana is undoubtedly the protagonist of this piece, but everyone else, even the ambiguous love interest Zeller, appears on screen barely defined. This might be a problem for anyone expecting a traditional narrative, but that's not what 'Red Desert' is about. There's no real progression of story here, only the progression of Guiliana's mental state, everything else is quite incidental and as such, is not admitted entry into Antonioni's vision. It's this bold vision that provides the films defining hallmark; the wonderful cinematography that surrounds Monica Vitti's accomplished, if somewhat overwrought, performance.