Sept. 7, 1964 - Michelangelo Antonioni’s new film, “Red Desert” (“Deserto Rosso”), shown at the Venice Film Festival today, has the look of a winner.
Its imaginative use of color (the director’s first experiment in this field), the compelling performance of Monica Vitta in the lead role, and the bold strokes with which mood and atmosphere are achieved have drawn praise from the various and opposing factions of the audience.
Antonioni again indulges in probing the motives of neurotic behavior, this time investigating the case of a Ravenna engineer’s wife who is in a state of mental shock as a result of an automobile accident.
On the verge of manic depression, she is tortured by her oppressive surroundings. The factory dynamos, the radar towers, the noise, smoke, steam, and tempo of modern industrialization take on an ominous aspect for her. She is never at peace, the prey of a thousand nameless terrors.
Her husband (Carlo Chionetti) is somewhat indifferent to her suffering, and in despair she takes a friend of his, another engineer (Richard Harris), as her lover. It is a brief and in no way soothing romance, and when he goes off on an assignment in South America, she seeks to readjust herself to family life.
Antonioni has once more taken his favorite theme — the individual’s isolation in modern society — but in “Red Desert,” he has given it new dimension and fascinating variety.
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