Red Desert

Red Desert was shot in the industrialized North of Italy, where Monica Vitti, as the wife of an electronics engineer, suffers what would be called a nervous breakdown at any other time, in any other place. In 1964, Red Desert is post–postwar promise. In his first color film, here is Antonioni, the painter on screen, the abstract expressionist. But the film’s very beauty is hewn from an environmental apocalypse that is at once metaphor and reality: factories, pipes, yellow smoke trailing to the sky; figures lost in a poisoned fog, staring into a poisoned bog. Vitti distills the ambivalence of her earlier performances in L’avventura and L’eclisse into the figure of a woman so anxiety-ridden she is no longer sensual, rather, overly sensitive and barely sensate. The textures of her world have become alien to her. Red Desert asks the question the earlier films were not ready to ask: “What is human nature when there is no more Nature?”