My Criterion DVD of L'Eclisse was still sitting alongside my DVD player today (some weeks after an impromptu screening) and before returning it to the shelf, I stole some time to watch the hour-long 2001 RAI produced documentary Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema, which offers a decent overview of his career. What made the documentary worth watching was the remarkable footage from the Red Desert shoot showing assistants spraying grasses and bushes with an industrial paint. I long thought that oft repeated line, attributed to Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Antonioni had "entire fields painted" for the film was apocryphal, but at last here’s the proof. The revelation was enough to prompt a screening of Red Desert and it's always a pleasure to revisit my favourite Antonioni film. Even now, after numerous screenings over the years, I still find it a strange and contradictory picture. Antonioni emphasizes the poisoned grasses and lakes with their unnatural colors and textures (which must have stirred the environmental consciousness of some of his Italian audiences), but Antonioni himself favored innovation and development, and found more vibrancy in the industrial architecture of Ravenna (where the film was shot) than in the region's natural beauty. Indeed I still remain uncertain whether Antonioni is actually sympathetic to Monica Vitti's anxiety-racked Giuliana, and I get the sense that Antonioni is shrugging his shoulders at Giuliana's plight, as if to say change, progress and adapt or be damned. A key line in the film, and perhaps a clue to Antonioni's philosophy comes right at the end, when Giuliana tells her son, that the birds have learned to avoid the plumes of sulfuric smoke in order to survive.
If Red Desert is my favourite Antonioni film, it's certainly Monica Vitti's best Antonioni film. The lost and alienated Giuliana feels a more more substantial character than the aloof, ephemeral women she played in L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and even with the hindrance of post-sync line-readings, her performance achieves a genuine pathos. On this screening of the film, I couldn't help but judge Richard Harris' character Corrado harshly. He's one of the very few people in the film who empathizes with Giuliana's sense of alienation but ultimately he's only briefly passing through Giuliana's life and he knows it. His solution to his own sense of alienation is to keep on the moving, and in the end all he can only offer her before he departs for the southern hemisphere is some meaningless sex which only deepens Giuliana's predicament. The film ends as it begins, with Giuliana left to wander that haunted space between her inner and outer landscapes, the film offering no solution to her problems, only a dream or perhaps a memory to cling to, of a young girl in a beautiful rocky cove, far away from the toxic red desert...
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