Red Desert

Michelangelo did not quite set the world on fire with his major trilogy at the start of the '60s -- L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse -- certainly not in the sense that Godard could raise the glasses of the art world in the same period (though Godard himself looked to the Italian for guidance at times, and his influence can be seen in several of the French director's '60s films). His daring aesthetic captured alienation so well that it alienated many viewers even in the snobbier, more discerning realm of the cinephiles. Following the quick succession of the trilogy's release, Antonioni took two years off before reemerging, this time with his first color film. And if people thought his detail was precise before, they hadn't seen anything yet.

To call Red Desert a painterly film would be accurate in several ways but also a misdirection. True, Antonioni had such a precise idea in mind that he actually had fields and trees painted to achieve a certain look, but that tidbit, divorced from context, creates an image in one's head of surreal fancy, which is the far from the end result. Rather, the director paints some of the real objects to in effect heighten their reality, a paradoxical action that somehow works: without stifling the beauty of the objects he films, Antonioni manages to cast the microcosm of the plant in drab greys and dull greens.

When those colors mesh with the more tantalizing hues of painted metal and plastic, however, Antonioni crafts a world that seems so different from Earth. For all our talk of interstellar travel, humanity has already changed this planet into something unrecognizable, which the director stresses over the opening credits, blurry shots of factories coated in jaundiced fog supplemented by a score of industrial, electronic beeps, whistles and groans as a lone female voice warbles up and down as if being tuned with a dial. Set in an industrial shipyard constructing all sorts of power plants and other structures, Red Desert creates a zoned-out atmosphere even when the image snaps into clarity, showing polluted gray skies and striking workers who can barely be discerned from the dull surroundings as giant vents belch flames and nuclear cooling towers sit unmoving like giant ceramics, holding back material that could destroy the countryside. Nearby, the rock smolders as if volcanic rock and sludge grimes the blackened water, and at times the area takes on a hellish appearance. Even the fog that blankets the shipyard compounds this, as it offers no chance to glance at anything outside this grinding industrial nightmare, and ships occasionally punch through to bring more souls to the area, though we don't see them carrying people back to the rest of the world.

To this bizarre yet real place comes Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of an engineer who moves out with him and their young, gifted son. Having been recently released from a mental hospital after an attempted suicide, Giuliana differs from Vitti's earlier performances by her immediately visible madness. As if the final product of the collaborations of the director and actress, Giuliana is less a person than a collection of tics searching for meaning. Unlike her husband and child, she does not understand how to operate in an industrial environment, and her inability to do so leads her to a crisis in which she questions even basic functions. "I feel like my eyes are all wet," she exclaims at one point. "What do people expect me to do with my eyes? What am I supposed to look at?" Placed in a world without identifiable symbols and a sense of navigability, Giuliana cannot act, and thus she has no life to speak of.

Matching her existential crisis, albeit in a more subdued manner, is Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), the friend and co-worker of Giulana's husband, Ugo. Where Ugo reacts to his wife's instability by trying to place it out of sight and ignore her darker side, Corrado stares her madness head-on and does not treat her as a freak. Harris gives a rooted performance that some have dismissed as stiff, but the secret of his work here is that Antonioni flips his traditional gender roles, making Corrado the vision of quiet neurosis and Giuliana the one in full-on breakdown. "Sometimes I feel like I have no right to be where I am," he confides in Giuliana. "Perhaps that's why I keep moving." He knows his way around the area, at least in business/administrative matters, but he feels no more comfortable than Giuliana.

Together, each finds someone who at last understands the other, and the hope for stability arises. Giuliana smiles for the first time around Corrado, who feels secure to share some of his misgivings about the world with her. "Deep down, one doesn't really know what one believes in," he says, a statement that seems less declarative than mournful. Yet the two do not give in to each other completely, for this is not a love story. Giuliana cannot quite pin down what she's afraid to face (after all, what she's terrified of is everything), and Corrado masks a deeper guilt and regret for some unexplained event or aspect of his life. Harris had some of the saddest eyes in the business, and he uses them to great effect here, a tiny peephole into a darker realm that mars his gentlemanly, attracting rapport. When Giuliana has another meltdown and tries to leave the island, she asks him to come before thinking of her husband, saying, "You're a part of me now." That phrasing, made before the two share even a kiss, reveals just how desperately she depends on the man to help her find some sanity in the world.

Though the two do not make sexual advances until the end of the film, sexual tension dominates the film, and not simply between them. Giuliana, Corrado, Ugo and several other colleagues meet in a shack, where conversation turns to aphrodisiacs. Then, the situation morphs into an orgy, but an orgy as only Antonioni could conceive it. Seeking to release their buried tensions and insecurities, they group paws over each other, but before anyone can have sex, they all devolve into giggles and different chat subjects, substituting more inane talk for the more cathartic distraction of group sex. Subtly, the characters understand this, and they release the pent-up energy by jovially tearing pieces of the wooden shack apart to burn them for heat, seeking a heat source to help vent their own raised body temperatures. Giuliana attracts the attention for her outward madness, but there's something unsettling about a group of people giving into carnal desires without even fulfilling them.

That the room where these people engage in their "orgy" is red is possibly the clearest and simplest use of color on a subtextual level in the film. I don't know of a movie that uses color to such specific ends as this. Giuliana arrives at the start of the film wearing a green overcoat that stands sharply against the grays that surround her, while her son wears red. Antonioni uses such splashes of vivid color to communicate brief snatches of hope. The green of an garden growing among the torn-up soil of the construction zone, the snatch of red pipeline, the blue bottles that capture Corrado's attention during a meeting and the blue stripe on the wall that he follows with his eyes as if seeing if it will lead out the door and somewhere else, all of them gorgeous and tantalizing. Godard owed a great deal to Antonioni before and after this picture -- I can now see L'Avventura in bits of Vivre sa vie, with its moments of inaction and quiet existentialist despair, and this in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, another film about a woman lost in a modernizing world always under construction. Here, however, the Italian seems to reciprocate the flattery, using the same brightly colored metals and plastics that informed Godard's Pop Art aesthetic and bridging them with the thematic weight of the story in a way that links the colors to the emotion of the film where Godard's usage was more concerned with aesthetic radicalism.

This becomes clearer in the way that Antonioni also brings out the beauty of the gray, steel world of the industrial zone. The girders that rise up dozens of stories, erecting massive structures in a short amount of time, help create objects that are impressive and architecturally appealing even at their most utilitarian and spare. A robot toy that looks as if it's made from such material stands with lit eyes at the edge of the child's bed at night as if guarding him, and the rudimentary nature of the toy, made out of those old Erector sets for budding young engineers, serves as but the precursor for future models that will be far more sleek, efficient and even lifelike. Dan Schneider rightly pegs the film not as being influenced by Impressionism but Precisionism, an off-shot of Cubism that redirected that artform back to realistic depictions. Noted American artists like Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe created works in the subgenre, but its most important artist was Charles Demuth, whose hyper-real depictions of industrial subjects could be inserted among the frames of Red Desert and look right at home, especially when the more vibrant colors meet the drabber tones and create a nearly surreal effect.

Charles Demuth, Aucassin and Nicolette

But what of those blurry shots? Well, those do not show Giuliana's unfocused view of the world so much as the rest of the world's confusion over her. She appears in shallow focus against blurs around her because she stands out and the world doesn't know how to make her a part of the rest of the blur. Giuliana, for her part, would love to fit in; at the end, as her doomed relationship with Corrado falls apart, she tells him, "There's something terrible about reality, but I don't know what it is. No one will tell me." The out-of-focus shots are but one way Antonioni uses his exacting blocking and focal lenses to tell the story. That coat that Giuliana wears at the beginning communicates her character not just through color but how she wears it: buttoned-up to her neck, the coat represents not only how distinct she is from the herd but how tightly wound she is.

Just as Antonioni stressed the beauty of the old world in L'Avventura, so too does he emphasize the potential for the new planet being constructed from the forged contents of the previous one. He does not shy away from the pollutants caused by this upheaval, but he knows that the problem with a modern world is not that it is beyond us but that we must adapt our emotional state along with our intellectual advancement. The casting of Harris alone hints at his optimistic vision of what modernity could bring: since he has to dub Richard's Irish brogue with an authentically Italian voice, Antonioni could have saved himself (and, to be honest, Harris, who had an infamous fight with the director during production) the trouble and just cast an Italian. But Harris' presence hints at the dissolution of national boundaries in a world that will eventually be linked by wireless signals that allow for instant communication across the world; paradoxically, the metal, plastic structure of the post-industrial world expose the artificiality of man-made national boundaries. What matters most is whether people can empathize with each other, something made clear at the end when Giuliana finally pours out her grief to a sailor who doesn't speak Italian; he doesn't know what she's saying, but he kindly sits there and lets her vent, and she finds a small amount of closure in this, allowing for the possibility of moving forward by the film's end. (It might also explain why the film is known by its English translation Red Desert instead of the original Il deserto rosso.)

But perhaps the most piercing and beautiful moment of the film comes when Giuliana's son falls ill, suddenly unable to walk and unresponsive to reflex tests when Giuliana tries to prove he's faking. Scared her son has polio, Giuliana doesn't realize -- because no one could -- that her son is suffering the same as she is, and his body is shutting down because he cannot find an emotional link to this world either. Bed-ridden, the boy asks his mother for a story, and she begins to invent a tale to which Antonioni cuts. We see a girl on a beach untouched by industrialization, swimming in an ocean of overwhelming blue. As the story continues, we can clearly see that the protagonist of Giuliana's tale is Giuliana herself, but not in the sense of childhood remembrance but of an idealized vision of what she wanted from life.

One day, the girl spots a sailing ship off her island, unlike any sailboat that ever blew past the area. Intrigued, she swims out to the boat, but it suddenly changes course and leaves. Having been subtly rejected by this vision of human progress, the girl swims back to shore, where she suddenly hears an angelic voice singing throughout the island. She combs the place looking for the source of the voice, but only when she surveys and truly studies the island, noting for the first time how its rocks "were like flesh," does she understand that the island itself is singing.

Giuliana's story clearly shows us how badly she wants to return to a simpler way of living, when machines did not make man obsolete and sensuality was pure instead of some creepy parlor game. Giuliana cannot hear the music anymore, if she ever could, which explains her despair. But there is hope in this film: after hearing the story, the son walks again. As much as Giuliana's story promoted her own hatred of modernity, the boy now hears the singing around him, and he will be among the generation to adapt to this new environment. For all of the aesthetic perfection of Antonioni's work, it is moments like this that show his true mastery: Red Desert is a film that uses every ounce of its visual form, especially its color, to convey emotion. I wonder what it says about the way we all watch film that such a movie had to wait until 2010 for enough attention to warrant a solid home video release.

L'Avventura

The title of Michelangelo Antonioni's breakthrough feature, L'Avventura, translates to "The Adventure," an ironic header for a film in which practically nothing of consequence happens. When something does, it disappears quickly into the morass of ennui that rolls off the characters as if perspiration. Even the rollicking Italian music that opens the film misleads the audience, who initially reacted at Cannes with such fervent boos that the film's eventual Jury Prize win must have raised a few fists, much less eyebrows.

With time, however, Antonioni's film, the first in a trilogy concerning man's alienation in a changing world, has asserted itself among the vanguard of foreign cinema, a touchstone of the art house movement that blossomed in America during the '60s (Europe was, of course, ahead of the curve). More importantly, it introduced one of the great poets of modern cinema, a man who, in advance of the full explosion of the French New Wave, could visualize existentialism better than any of the Cahiers lads.

In fact, no other filmmaker so deserves the adjective "modern" attached to his name. Until his output slowed to a crawl after 1975's The Passenger, Antonioni captured the changing world with a keenly perceptive and greatly concerned eye, a master of detail whose precision allowed for a sense of grace and ambiguity. L'Avventura, like some of the other great, visually told works of the '60s -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Playtime -- deals with modernity and changing social interaction. Where both Kubrick and Tati in at least some respects feared this change, however, Antonioni embraces the modern world. What he feared was humanity's separation from the world it had made.

Consider the environment of L'Avventura: far from the space stations and geometrically pure buildings of those other films, Antonioni's work showcases the Old World, from rocky Mediterranean islets formed by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago to centuries-old classical Sicilian architecture. This is not a world suddenly foisted upon an unsuspecting species, yet the characters who inhabit it are just as shiftless and alienated as those who bumble about Tati's sleek, right-angled Paris. As becomes clear in the director's later films, humanity has outgrown its past but has not yet embraced its future, thus trapping mankind in a nebulous limbo that prevents meaningful emotional connection.

That lack of resonant emotion informs the sparsity of the plot. Two friends, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), embark on a yacht trip with two wealthy couples and Anna's lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). Upon reaching a rocky island a few miles offshore, everyone falls asleep sunbathing, only to find Anna missing. She is never found. In any other film, that might be a spoiler.

But the point of L'Avventura is not the search for a missing friend. Moments such as Anna's disappearance, in which something actually happens, mark the only time the film ever moves quickly; elsewhere, the film plays out arduously, inching forward to capture nothing while that worth capturing happens just outside these people's field of view. Unlike other films with protracted, loose narratives, the bare plot of L'Avventura appears to be the result of the collective disinterest of its characters, too absorbed in their own ennui to give a damn about contributing to a story.

Such aimless egoism informs the mise-en-scène as well. Unlike those aforementioned visual epics, the equally pristine film here is bite-sized; even when characters venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, the frame is restrictive and cramped. Lisca Bianca, the nearly unpopulated island, is photographed in more severe a manner than Ingmar Bergman's desolate Fåro, its craggy landscape communicating the jagged, stony emotional state of the wealthy young group who vacation there.

Their initial reaction to Anna's disappearance is annoyance, which only develops into concern later. Not that the two feelings look all that different in their faces; these characters default to boredom, and their wealth, proof of Italy's recovery in the aftermath of their defeat in World War II, becomes not a means to show the country's progression away from its fascist turmoil to a cooperative and prosperous place but merely a blanket with which to cover their despair. They sail, suntan, screw and preen with perfunctory automation, distracting themselves from their mounting dissatisfaction. When Claudia and Anna go to pick up Sandro at the beginning, the two lovers have sex while Claudia stands outside, impatient. Far from consumed by passion, however, the couple just seems to want a kick to start the day, as if imbibing a much more fun kind of coffee. Later, when Claudia and Sandro return from the island sans Anna, they strike up a relationship mere days after their friend goes missing, and the two begin flirting before they even leave the island.

Claudia and Sandro's relationship does not seem so much an outgrowth of animosity for Anna -- though Claudia does struggle with feelings of budding happiness that her friend is gone, and guilt for those feelings -- but a demonstration of the existential quandary in which humanity has found itself. It no longer matters who we interact with, only that the interactions continue uninterrupted. Without constant repetition of , these people have nothing tangible to cling to, so they place Anna out of mind and gently rearrange people to fill the gaps. Gloria, a writer friend, comes to visit after the characters return to the mainland, and her beauty attracts the attention of every man in a three-mile radius. Yet Gloria, married and not exactly fond of all the ogling, mentions how much work it is to maintain herself, even if she cannot say why she still bothers to work for the leers she does not want. At some point, the difficulty of keeping up with the standard of beauty simply became a part of life, and she cannot break from it, so she continues to act in such a manner because she feels that the universe itself expects it from her. Even Anna's father, a diplomat who ostentatiously rushes out to Lisca Bianca in a catamaran, appears concerned and angry mostly because he understands that a person in his position should act that way.

Shooting this meandering journey of doubt and buried loathing, Antonioni gives form and beauty to what could easily be dismissed as plodding nonsense. Indeed, L'Avventura moves so slowly in places that one cannot counter the argument that the director has no direction with a mere, "That's the point." But the precision of the camera movement belies any claim that Antonioni is futzing about. With the characters unable to even pinpoint their unease, much less confront it, Antonioni communicates emotion as much through blocking as the actors do with their body language. On the island, he separates the characters with extreme space, capturing the mise-en-scène with deep focus yet presenting nothing for the audience to fixate upon. Characters rarely face each other, all of them instead facing forward and speaking as if into the void, arranged in a way as to be off-center without quite aligning to the rule of thirds. The result burrows into your subconscious, communicating underlying tension without resorting to anything other than clever placement. Even the sound design is nuanced, emphasizing the crush of waves against rock faces and footfalls echoing around vast hallways of old Italian buildings now cordoned off as museums, effectively barricading mankind from taking shelter in its past.

That subtlety of direction is matched by Viiti's performance. Antonioni loved female protagonists, believing women to internalize torment more impassively than men, perhaps because society oppressed them for so many centuries that such behavior became ingrained even in progressive types. Claudia occasionally sheds some tears, occasionally looks as if she might lose it, but her madness is not so kind. It will not allow her to vent. Only the hesitation in her voice and the uncertainty of her movement betray the emotions boiling within.

Antonioni refuses even to allow those emotions to flood to the surface, however, even in the quietly horrific finale, which mounts pressure as soon as a stunned and unsure Claudia does not respond to Sandro's marriage proposal seriously. the director begins to shift everyone else around her, surrounding the woman with men who come to resemble the avian foes of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, perched on ledges above and edging near her with predatory stalks. The night after the new couple sleeps in a fancy hotel, Claudia awakens to find her lover gone and hunts for him through the eerily spacious building before at last finding him with a call girl. Even when motivated to strong emotion at last, Claudia storms off lest someone see her break. As if to prove Antonioni's point about the heightened emotional subtlety of women, Sandro completely loses it in shame, unable to look at Claudia or even the prostitute, who tantalizingly asks him for a "souvenir" (the Italian word also translates to "memory"), causing Sandro to harshly throw down a few Lira.

L'Avventura culminates in its most hauntingly beautiful scene, a wordless non-denouement as Sandro catches up to Claudia, only to drain whatever else is left in him as he slumps into a park bench and somehow summons even more tears. Without any exchange of apologies or verbal resolution, Claudia merely stands over the wretched man, eventually reaching out to place her hand on his head. Having reversed from the front to see this action, Antonioni then pulls back to show the characters now facing away from the camera, now too self-absorbed and broken to even look in our direction. Yet the true power of the shot lies in its suggestive framing: to Sandro's right is a giant wall, blank but for the roughness of its texture. To the left, enveloping Claudia, is a shot of Mount Etna in the distance, swirling as if ready to blow. It doesn't, and neither does she, but dark times are clearly ahead for these two, even with their halting reconciliation.

Antonioni made L'Avventura in a time when artistic movements favored detachment, from the beatniks to the cool jazz they loved. There are good aspects to these styles, of course, such as free jazz's adventurous break from rhythmic forms; hell, detachment informs a great deal of the aesthetic of this film. But Antonioni does not want us to stand so far outside art that we no longer truly care for it. When Claudia walks through an art gallery at the beginning, she walks past some snooty appraisers who take a small glance at a painting and say of its artist, "This one has to starve for a while yet." These bourgeois fools care nothing for the content, merely expecting the artist to destroy himself so that some emotion be placed on the canvas, emotion the appraisers then never have to feel for themselves. Later, however, Antonioni shows us an artist, an aloof egomaniac who dismisses the gorgeous models who pose for him as a "dime a dozen" and puts little effort into his work (this idea would be revisited in more detail with the director's English-language debut, Blowup). When people are in their most desperate need for the guiding light of art to show them the beauty and worthiness of the world, the supposed anti-Establishment types are revealed to be no more alienated than anyone else, and that their detachment only separates them from self-knowledge.

The environments of Michelangelo Antonioni's films do not engender madness in the characters who inhabit them; the locations merely facilitate the release of neurosis. "How are you?" Sandro asks Anna after their first coital session at the start. "Awful," she replies, yet when her lover asks her "Why?" she has no answer. With this direct confrontation, Anna cannot deny her anomie, and she writhes in agony on Sandro's bed as he tries to calm her. Anna understands, and so she disappears, perhaps taking her life in despair, perhaps simply escaping from her life to forge a new one with meaning. Before she slips out of the film, however, she becomes the clearest avatar of Antonioni's own intentions: to him, the changing world is filled with potential, but the state of mankind's spiritual existence is too terrifying to tolerate. It may be long, it may be slow, but L'Avventura is a cry from the heart, a plea for the audience to see how terrible, and unnecessarily so, we make our lives. An optimist might say that the director's eventual decline in output could signify that Antonioni saw humanity adapting to its new world, but the dark implication of L'Avventura suggests that people will always be able to create a new world before they will know how to live in it, and that by the time we adapt to the current model, the next shift is about to hit. Maybe Antonioni, incapacitated for years after a crippling stroke in 1985 after being fitfully active over the previous decade, simply grew tired of watching the world slip just out of the grasp of its creators.