Il deserto rosso (1964)'s comments

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CorPse

I found this beautiful... but empty.

4 years 11 months ago

monclivie

-I'm scared of colors!
-Let's bang.

6 years 5 months ago

Scream1008

I think I admired the filmmaking more than I enjoyed watching it. Very slow moving...L'avventura is certainly better imo

12 years 9 months ago

akuma587

Incredible film. A visual masterpiece. I love how dramatically subtle Antonioni's films are.

13 years 6 months ago

Michelangelo Antonioni treats his first color film, Red Desert, as an exploration of color. It doesn't just happen to BE in color, it presents people and objects as blocks of vibrant color in bleak, almost black and white, spaces, separating (and that's a key word) or integrating his characters into the world he's, painter-like, created. Monica Vitti (who I could watch all day, what a presence) is a woman very much separate from her world, incapable of adjusting, suffering from anxiety and what today we would call PTSD following a car accident. Her husband, her son, her friends, her lover all cause her to feel estrangement, and Antonioni translates that into images and sounds - the musique concrete is as industrial as the backgrounds, filled with acid smoke, blank walls, robotic toys, and ships seemingly floating through the landscape. The film is entirely about an existential crisis isolating her character, and in the end, she's merely learned to avoid the "triggers". She copes, but one can ask if coping is the same as adjusting. The birds that avoid the factory smoke have not learned to breathe it. A gorgeous, elliptical film, and though it doesn't have the vocabulary to talk about mental illness the way we understand it today (Vitti's character is perhaps only "fragile", not to use the word "hysterical", which the film thankfully doesn't), it still resonates with truth.

4 years 4 months ago

mikhaelmt

The cinematography and Vitti's performance... so great.

11 years 8 months ago

dombrewer

I'm with Scream1008 on this one - I didn't get a great deal out of it, as beautiful as some of the imagery was. Vitti's performance was also not especially convincing in its histrionics coupled with the odd casting of Richard Harris. Lacking the mystery element of fantastic films like L'avventura, The Passenger and Blow Up this one bored more than enthralled.

12 years ago

Dieguito

Michelangelo Antonioni for me is the greatest real artist in movies. The cinematography of all his movies are perfect and stunning, and he couldn't do less in his first color movie!! Colors are very intense in Il Deserto Rosso, even most scenes tending to grey. And the indescribable joy of watching Monica Vitti in colors!!

12 years 3 months ago

dranoparty

This movie made me want to clean my room

11 years 2 months ago

K.

Michaelangelo Antonioni discussing the film - "It's too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention ... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable ... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date."

8 months ago

As3d

Monica Vitti in color!

9 years 6 months ago