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Lack of good storyline.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

From the first time I saw "Red Desert", I discovered it as a portrait of a state. it coult be defined as alienation. but, in essence, it has not name. Giuliana is just a symbol of a deep form of solitude. the film represents only a travel across the rooms of the state, from the industrial places, laughings, family scenes, confessions, meetings, jokes, steps near the other, projects and memories. a film about the area of a large crisis. and not the story becomes significant scene by scene, but the art of Michelangelo Antonioni to translate one of the most gray forms of interior silences. because "Red desert" is a portrait. precise to cruel. for a state. defining our world so complete.

There is a place in modern civilization that I find more horrible than any nightmare mankind has ever created before, except maybe the holocaust. It's exactly those soulless, faceless industrial compounds that dump toxic waste into the ground and poisonous fumes into the air. Whenever I see them in real life, my heart sinks. It's the ugly backbone of human progress, I guess.Il deserto rosso is a very thoroughly replica of this nightmare. The film makes us look at it for two hours from all imaginable angles. To make the disheartening effect even stronger, it shows us a group of people who seem to have adapted to live in such an environment, or maybe were oblivious of it from the beginning. It's actually very simple to survive in a dehumanized place: you just have to dehumanize yourself. If you don't, you might end up like Guliana.She's the main character, played by Monica Vitti, and seems to be the only one affected by her surroundings. She almost cannot deal with it. Her symptoms of anxiety and depression seem to stem from an accident she had earlier, while it is unclear whether the accident was the cause or the effect of her despair. She feels attraction for a drifting coworker of her husband, because they both dream of escape. An escape that only seems possible in her imagination, as depicted in the one sequence of the film that is not utterly hopeless: the young girl on the beach.I find this film really hard to rate. The cinematography is superior. I still see Guliana's green coat against the background of the grayish industrial plant and the dark vegetation. It's also totally depressing. It points a finger at the chimera we have created, but does just that, in highly composed imagery. Some viewers can abstract these things in their brains and therefore be detached, some might find that complying with an empty existence equals „hope". For me, it was a bit too close for comfort.

I have hitherto watched 7 and ⅓ of Antonioni's films, the ⅓ is referred to EROS (2004, 6/10), so I think I may entitle to attest that it does take time to appreciate his oeuvre and subdue the often wayward elusiveness in his storytelling. RED DESERT is prominent because it is Antonioni's first colour feature, and remarkably the first one has already been able to stun the world with its unique palette aesthetics, with "Red" in the title, one might assume the film would be a torrid emotional roller-coaster with desire and energy, but what the film actually presents is the consuming mental malady in the budding industrialism, set in Ravenna, our protagonist is Giuliana (Antonioni's regular muse Vitti), a married woman with a proclivity of mental unstableness due to an accident which never be disclosed to viewers. Her husband Ugo (Chionetti) is the manager of a petrol-chemical plant, so she often wanders in the drab surroundings with her son (Bartoleschi).The production team does a singular job to construct an inhumane optical exhibition with smoke-puffing smokestacks, giant radio telescope pylons, egregious industrial waste, mechanical factories, formidable cargo vessels, all conspires to a magnificent manufactured landscape, it all seems familiar, but under Antonioni's fabrication, everything is either eerily suffocating or frostily portentous, Giuliana is completely enveloped by this breathless state, even after she meets Ugo's business associate Corrado (Harris), she projects him as an alternative to elude her tormented id, they grow closer, she confides in him, but Corrado is a too reticent man to divulge his thoughts, he is a keen observer, there is undeniable lust in his eyes (specifically in the episode where they are in a shack near the pier with Ugo and their friends for the action of the forthcoming but tacit adultery), but mostly it is more like a psychiatrist watches his patient, he listens, often attentively, yet, he is powerless to get her through, eventually he submits to man's primitive sex drive and leaves her astray in the limbo of her impaired perception about her existence. It is a continuum which extends from Antonioni's Black & White "Incommunicability Trilogy: L'AVVENTURA (1960, 6/10), LA NOTTE (1961, 8/10) and L'ECLISSE (1962, 7/10)", and under this specific milieu, the time- irrelevant setting with persistent humming around, it transcends into a telling disposition of our wanting comprehension of the reality, and the ever-so-unfathomable of a human soul.Monica Vitti accomplishes arguably her career-best performance here, she is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, sometimes it is even painful to behold such a destructively raw liberation, she is eternally situated in a state of fright, of the air she breathe, of the sound pestering her mind, of everything around her. Harris is dubbed, but his character doesn't register anything more than a plot deployment as a witness of Vitti's self-inflicted syndrome and a recipient of her ambiguous desire. There are two highlights needs to be noted as the counterpart of all the man-made scenery, one is the phenomenal nightmarish fog shots which captures the quintessence of Giuliana's mindset when she is wholly sequestered from the saner mass; another is in the fable Giuliana told her son, the spectacular pink beach, where a lonely girl swims everyday, until one day she finds an empty sailing boat and then hears the omnipresent singing which she cannot find its source, the fable per se can sparkle off manifold interpretations apropos of Giuliana's own conditions, but most admiringly is that it renders an eerily mythic touch and leavens the otherwise perseverance-requiring viewing process, that's what we call a masterstroke.

Red Desert is a beautifully shot film about that ever-modern problem of alienation in the face of progress. Michelangelo Antonioni is as interested in obscuring images as he is capturing them: he periodically drifts his action out of focus, and in one of the film's most masterful scenes, places a dense layer of fog between his principals and his camera, fading them into just barely visible silhouettes. Antonioni also demonstrates a masterful command of color: his stark yellows and reds jump out from his gloomy grey world with all the menace of a poisonous animal. As the film reaches its climax, it becomes increasingly dissonant and disorienting--in all the best ways, of course. Red Desert is a great film; it captures the common angst of modernity with an uncommon mastery of Mise-en-scène and cinematography.