Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

shoobe01-1 Yup, it's another Antonioni. Should have learned my lesson after Zabriskie Point but I guess I keep expecting a color-filled Blow Up. I'd go to 3-4 stars for this film with just Monica Vitti walking around jarring industrial landscapes. Carlo Di Palma does a great job filming, but only when outdoors, and more than about 4 feet away. Closeups and small interiors feel TV like, and horribly stifled. Several times I felt we were half a step from a telenovela. But mostly, I didn't even care what they said. The story is lacking, or stupid, or poorly done, or pointless. I don't care about anyone in the film, at all. I so don't care about the story I find it hard to evaluate it. Oh, and Richard Harris is a native of Trieste? Why? What is this silliness? Not a thing he did from talking about how out of place he is in the world to kicking straw in the yard felt remotely real.

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.

Slime-3 Some film review books claim Antonioni's best work was all shot in monochrome and thereafter he was less effective, but this movie easily dispels that argument. Colour gives him an extra tool with which to elaborate his familiar themes of alienation and failing relationships. It's the best work I've seen by this darling- director of the art-house set. The use of colour, the eerie locations, the juxtaposition of almost horrific industrial installations belching coloured smoke with deserted ancient Italian streets and the electronic soundtrack (hard to call it a score as such)is disturbing and arresting. The natural world is grey and brown, the man-made elements are primary coloured, invasive and overpowering. Within this landscape, fizzing and gurgling with pollution and decay we find an unhinged engineers wife who's recovering poorly from a car accident and struggling to cope the responsibility of motherhood and being the wife of a man tied up with his career. Some reviewers pour scorn on Monica Vitti's performance in this difficult and complex lead role. Does she over act? Is she hamming it up? I'd prefer to think that she's playing the part of a woman on the edge, torn in different directions at a moment of emotional weakness, without the mental strength to comprehend how odd her behaviour actually is - in short, she's playing it right. Although it must me said her face is unusually immobile in every role she plays so if her body language might be considered over- the-top her facial expression certainly never is. And she has a distinct air of fragility about her. Richard Harris as the 'other man' in her life is an odd choice for the role. Clearly speaking English dialogue but dubbed over by an Italian-speaking actor, and thus lacking the familiar husky lilting tones one expects to hear. He's rather gloomy,but then so is everyone in this film! His character's presence seems only to push Vitti's closer to the abyss, adding another element of unhappiness and uncertainty to her tormented life.It's not, as you've no doubt deduced, a happy film, in any way, but it has a rhythm and style which will keep you watching and unlike Antonioni's previous films there is a certain structure which makes it more more accessible. Perhaps in being set among working people (although far from 'working class') as opposed to the 'idle rich' of films like L'AVENTTURA, gives it more gravitas? Frankly the navel-gazing of poor-me-life-is-such-a-bore characters of those films makes them much harder to care about than fragile frustrated Vitti in RED DESERT. For the immaculate visual style and striking use of colour alone, this film is well worth the effort (and it is sometimes an effort)of watching but the story line and Vitti's character also make it worth listening to. One curiosity - why the clearly intentional scenes shot out-of-focus? Bizarre and entirely pointless as far as I could see, but a minor quibble.

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.