looking to live
by
Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo
Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (writers), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert) / 1964
Everything that truly matters in this
film lies within its images, in the brutal (and yet, at moments, beautiful)
industrial landscape near the Italian town of Ravenna, in the way Monica Vitti
as Giuliana stumbles across the barren wasteland with her young son, Valerio,
or how she sits musing on a small staircase sitting stool, the terrifying
vision of a large quarantined ship suddenly skirting the family fishing shack.
The world of Giuliana and her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), even in its overly-bright
painted colors, is clearly a sick one, a society to which Giuliana is now
suddenly unable to adjust. Even the houses and streets of the nearby town seem
coated in chalk.
If Giuliana’s recent automobile accident
has left her physically unhurt, it has permanently affected her psychically,
and no matter how he might try, her husband will never be able to regain her
trust or love.
For most of his life he has simply wandered
the world, and is now seemingly searching for competent employees. A bit like
Giuliana, he intends to run a business without being sure what it actually is.
It is little wonder that he and Giuliana immediately link up. As he puts it:
You wonder what to look at. I wonder how
to live.
Same thing.
But, of course, it’s not the same thing.
Corrado seems even more disconnected to the world around him in his incessant
wanderings than does Giuliana in her locked up world, filled with smoke and
poison gasses. And even though the two share a one-night affair, he clearly
cannot provide her with a way out of the hell her husband and his generational peers
have created.
As several critics have pointed out, Red Desert is one of Antonioni’s
bleakest films, simply because the central woman figure in this work has no
strong male figure to who she might, even temporarily, turn. At least in L’Avventura, she could roam the country
with an attractive young man at will; here she is trapped in an industrial
landscape where yellow gasses are belched into the air. If there is a kind of
beauty to the industrialism—the kind of beauty that Demuth and other early 20th
century American artists found in the American industrial landscape—as she
tells her son, only the birds survive this poisonous air, since they can fly
above it.
If
in Antonioni’s previous films, the crises the character’s faced were
existential, the figures of The Red
Desert face a kind of cultural malaise that no individual can seemingly
escape, a kind of world the director will feature, as well, in his next film, Blow Up, wherein even reality is
difficult to discern. At least Giuliana recognizes that her world is a sick
one, while the hero of Blow Up is
even uncertain about what is real and what’s an illusion. If nothing else,
Giuliana has the evidence, and shares it with us.
Los Angeles, November
7, 2016
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