Pluskylang Great Film overall

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Sean Lamberger In this, his first step away from moody black and white cinema, experimental filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni sets out to "paint with color," and he succeeds with spectacular effect. Each shot resonates with artistry, from the lingering, hazy landscapes to the more complex, structured confines of a factory warehouse. Magnificently well-composed, it truly is like a moving painting. Slow-moving, I should say, because the famed director isn't shy about letting the camera linger and roam. Often, we'll wander away from subjects at the end of their scene to follow a line of paint up the wall or trace a curve of pipes through the cement ceiling. This seems essential, as the light storytelling and rambling, philosophical dialog constantly relies on such subtleties to deliver a sense of deeper meaning. The scant plot, focused around a timid, depressed housewife and her struggle to come to terms with the sad state of her life, can be a tall ask at times because it's so excruciatingly glacier-paced and spiritually draining. The bleak, industrial setting - where billowing towers of man-made chemicals and haunting, noisy machinery are the rule of the day - contains loud metaphors for the character's internal conflict, but you'll have to look and dig to find them. Not an easy film to watch, it can be fascinating but also extremely demanding. I'd call it a mixed success. In terms of proving the medium as a legitimate art form, it's a roaring triumph. As an engaging narrative, it falls very short.

HANS There is a place in modern civilization that I find more horrible than any nightmare mankind has ever created before, except maybe the holocaust. It's exactly those soulless, faceless industrial compounds that dump toxic waste into the ground and poisonous fumes into the air. Whenever I see them in real life, my heart sinks. It's the ugly backbone of human progress, I guess.Il deserto rosso is a very thoroughly replica of this nightmare. The film makes us look at it for two hours from all imaginable angles. To make the disheartening effect even stronger, it shows us a group of people who seem to have adapted to live in such an environment, or maybe were oblivious of it from the beginning. It's actually very simple to survive in a dehumanized place: you just have to dehumanize yourself. If you don't, you might end up like Guliana.She's the main character, played by Monica Vitti, and seems to be the only one affected by her surroundings. She almost cannot deal with it. Her symptoms of anxiety and depression seem to stem from an accident she had earlier, while it is unclear whether the accident was the cause or the effect of her despair. She feels attraction for a drifting coworker of her husband, because they both dream of escape. An escape that only seems possible in her imagination, as depicted in the one sequence of the film that is not utterly hopeless: the young girl on the beach.I find this film really hard to rate. The cinematography is superior. I still see Guliana's green coat against the background of the grayish industrial plant and the dark vegetation. It's also totally depressing. It points a finger at the chimera we have created, but does just that, in highly composed imagery. Some viewers can abstract these things in their brains and therefore be detached, some might find that complying with an empty existence equals „hope". For me, it was a bit too close for comfort.

Nicole C My film studies professor made us watch this film to understand the essence of the time-image as proposed by Gilles Deleuze. Basically, its a form of cinema wherein the story throughout the film makes not change whatsoever to how it ends. Here, we see Giuliana lost in the world with an unstable mentality and numerous mental breakdowns. At the end, she is still somewhat the same, however there is a minor change mentally, but not outwardly. Hiroshima Mon Amour would also be a perfect example of the time-image as pretty much nothing happens (I was figuratively dying watching that, and died a bit watching this – even the trailer gives multiple mind farts).The acting was awkward, the movements slow and deliberate, and there are lots of times in the film where time just seems to stop. This is intentional, but as a movie buff (of modern times), this does not entertain me.The cinematography was probably the only good thing in this film. Well, maybe some lines were great too. Mainly, everything that was shot (including the colour tinting of scenes) emphasized the inner workings of Giuliana's mind. That she feels like she is alone and doesn't belong anywhere. She clings to the walls when she walks, she sits next to a slanted cart that shows how she is out of balance with the world, and there are shots (mainly one that I can think of) where she is literally out of focus. She is like a red desert, 'red' perhaps alluding to her anxiety of feeling this way, and 'desert' referring to her solitude.Also, I do like the ending because it serves as a metaphor that she's found a way to keep on living with her disoriented mentality. Those ending lines were great. Oh and that one scene in the second half of the film about a story of a girl on an island, though totally random as it is, was interesting.Read more movie reviews at: championangels.wordpress.com

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.