*The Red Desert*: An Industrial Hellhole

Michelangelo Antonioni once said "There are people who adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are tied to ways of life that are now out of date". Clearly the heroine of The Red Desert (1964) has failed to adapt. Antonioni's film focuses on the psychological disintegration of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) who finds herself in an industrial hellhole that dominates the Italian landscape where she lives. Her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) is busy running a large factory and is seemingly oblivious to her recent suicide attempt while he was away on business in London. He is content to accept the story that Giuliana was in an auto accident. Their young son has a large erector set robot with glowing eyes that prowls his bedroom at night and he ultimately mirrors some of Giuliana's anxiety by feigning paralysis for a few hours that pushes his mother deeper into despair.

Only Corrado (Richard Harris), another prosperous industrialist, notices Giuliana's condition and becomes sympathetic to her despair. Since he appears to be the only human being in a world dominated by smoke stacks and enormous factories belching pollution that is interested in her feelings she is willing to develop a relationship with him as long as it provides her with some measure of support. The fact that they have a brief affair is meaningless.

It is Antonioni's constructed world that dominates the film's narrative. Combined with an outstanding and eerie electronic sound-scape, Giuliana and the contemporary viewer become trapped in a world that is overwhelmed by industrial waste, noise and fear. The natural world becomes pushed to the edges of the frame. This world is filled with ghostlike freighters that dock with quarantine flags run up their masts. Ugo and Corrado walk past polluted lakes laughing about how people now complain that their food tastes of oil. Corrado and Giuliana walk past a lone fruit and vegetable vendor. His outdoor display is full of ghostlike fruits and vegetables ashen and gray. Giuliana's son asks why the smoke pouring out of the factory smokestacks is so bright. "It's poison," she exclaims and we see a bright yellow smoke streaming into the sky.

Critics both in 1964 and to this day have marveled at how Antonioni shaped the visual world with overdetermined colors that made the world his own. The director was determined to paint his world with the exact pallete he envisioned and in this, his first color film, he was enormously successful. But it is naive to assume he was not also determined to define the post World War II success story of industrial Italy as a nightmare of success. Giuliana walks through this landscape, her son in tow, as if she witnessing the aftermath of an enormous war-scape. She may have not succeeded in adapting, but she is also falling apart in a world that gives her no room to breathe or see. She is out of date and Antonioni succeeds in creating a credible character who makes us feel what she is seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. And it is the taste and feel of waste.