Red Desert was shot in industrialized northern Italy, where Vitti, as the wife of an electronics engineer, suffers what would be called a nervous breakdown at any other time and place. In his first color film, Michelangelo Antonioni is the painter on-screen. The film’s very beauty is hewn from an environmental apocalypse that is at once metaphor and reality: factory pipes, yellow smoke trailing to the sky, figures lost in a poisoned fog, staring into a poisoned bog. Red Desert asks the question the earlier films were not ready to ask: What is human nature when there is no more nature?