By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: Red Desert
Red Desert (Four Stars)
Italy; Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964
Red Desert — Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature in color, and a landmark of ‘60s Italian cinema — is a hypnotic portrait of a neurotic woman, Guiliana (played by the director’s then muse/lover, Monica Vitti), whose psyche begins to disintegrate in the bleak terrain of the petrochemical plant where her husband is the manager, even as she tries to care for her mysteriously ill little son and also takes a lover, Corrado (Richard Harris). That industrial plant, Antonioni insists, is a thing of beauty. (The movie was shot in Northern Italy in Ravenna, Antonioni’s childhood hometown.) But it also symbol of a modernist age that drives sensitive souls like Guiliana toward` breakdown.
Red Desert, like the four great black-and white Antonioni films that preceded it, Il Grido (1957), L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), and the three brilliant English language color movies that followed it, Blowup (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), is visually stunning and dramatically somewhat terse and cryptic. The cool, precise compositions were influenced by the early color films of Godard and Resnais, and somewhat by contemporary abstract painting by artists like Rothko and Newman. The score balances nerve-jangling electronic music and achingly pure soprano arias by Giovanni Fusco. The acting alternates the poker-faced (Harris) with the anguished (Vitti). The film is a modernist classic about the dangers of modernism.
The movie, like all the best Antonioni, compels the eye, and disturbs the mind while delicately fraying the nerves. The showpiece scenes are a not-quite-orgy (an echo of the more unbuttoned orgies in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita) in a fogbound shack near the lake, with Guiliana, her husband, her lover-to-be and their friends, and a lyrical dream/child’s story sequence set on a private island with a gorgeous beach. Interestingly, Antonioni manipulated the colors (even to painting the grass and trees) in the factory scenes, while the dream island sequence is the only one in the movie done with all natural colors. The film, a near masterpiece, fills you with beautiful unease and cold poetry. (In Italian, with English subtitles.) Chicago, Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute. 164 N. State St., 312-846-2600. Browse www.siskelfilmcenter.org
Week run: 6 p.m., Fri., Nov 11. 7 :45 p.m., Sat., Nov. 12. 4:35 p.m., Sun., Nov. 13. 6 p.m., Mon., Nov. 14. 7:45 p.m., Tues., Nov. 15. 6 p.m., Wed., Nov. 16.
