Customer Reviews

Red Desert [VHS]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The usual cliche about Antonioni films is that they are studies of bored and alienated people, and are themselves vague and uninteresting. This line was started by Pauline Kael and is repeated by Leonard Maltin above, with not a second thought. But it is utterly wrong, and never more so than in the case of Red Desert. The main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is not bored - she is if anything too sensitively engaged with the world. She suffers from it as an artist suffers, feeling it in every part of her. (Her point of view is represented by Antonioni's careful abstract compositions, his beautiful use of colour.) But she also feels the lack of her husband's and son's love and it is this that drives her into an to attraction to Corrado (Richard Harris). He in turn is attracted to her and pretends to a closeness that he doesn't fully feel. The dynamics of this seduction are beautifully observed and movingly real.

But it is the character of Giuliana that drives the film. She seems to possess an integrity in her suffering that sets her apart. Antonioni seems to be searching her soul as he allows the camera to dwell on her expressions of hurt and desperation (as Godard did with Anna Karina). And Monica Vitti is so beautiful that it is ultimately painful to watch her. But as for the standard opinion - the only people who could be bored by this film are those who are bored with feeling itself. This is a masterpiece of observed sensitivity - a study of the heart's war on consciousness. It must be seen.

5 stars to the film itself! Here's a painful study of a woman's descent to lunacy amidst a desolate, uncaring and eventually foreboding backdrop of industrial waste. The character study is not unlike claustrophobic Polanski's Repulsion but dwells on Vitti's being consumed by her external surroundings as opposed to Deneuve's intensive plunge to schizophrenia. The pace and landscape is virtual Antonioni so it may not appeal to viewers who are not familiar with the director's works. One of his greatest works (L'Avventura remains his best to me). The only problem is the DVD transfer. I've seen the VHS and it has a consistent hue of orange. The DVD, although sharper and clearer, fluctuates in hues from blues in medium shots to reds and oranges in long shots. For a film that essentially deals with color (it was Antonioni's first color feature), the transfer was rather clumsy and careless. The sound is average but leaves a lot of room for improvement. Why didn't Criterion handle the transfer of this gorgeous film?

I sat through this film twice when it first came out in the1960's. I have seen it many times over the years. The painterly imagesare rich, lonely, and seductive. Antonioni is a painter making film. The plot is secondary. Monica Vitti is an ancient goddess trapped in the dead, souless corporate world. Being a trophy wife is making her crazy. Do the men we love ever really love us? Is modern man trapped in sterile scientific thinking and cut off from the passion of the archaic world? I love this beautiful movie. I'm so happy it's being released.

If you have a multi-region player, you should order the British Film Institute DVD of RED DESERT/IL DESERTO ROSSO film from England. It's transferred from the original negative and has much more faithful color than the unrestored, somewhat faded materials used for the now out-of-print Image Entertainment edition that currently goes for high prices. Don't get me wrong, the Image Entertainment edition isn't that bad, but it pales next to the BFI. The quality of the color is critical for this particular film.

The BFI has also released a Blu-ray of the same transfer, and I hear it's stunning. But it's region "B," and all-region Blu-ray players are extremely difficult to come by.

Until a company like Criterion releases a new transfer of THE RED DESERT in the U.S., the imported BFI DVD is your best option.

(rev. 10/4/03)
I don't care if its the orange-tinted DVD copy, or whatever, you have to own at least one copy of this film. It is so very beautiful, and bears repeated viewings. I've seen it forty times, and this is a conservative estimate.

(While you're at it, be sure to see - and own, if your prehensile to the direction in which I hint - Antonioni/Wenders effort, BEYOND THE CLOUDS, a film I saw in a battered print in an art house, after it had made the rounds for a couple of years - and was still able to conclude to an interested friend, that CLOUDS was also one of the most beautiful, intelligent films I had ever seen.)

It doesn't even matter that you can't "understand" it (watch anything enough times, and you'll start to "understand" it.)
Many people who can't fully "understand" (whatever that word really means) this film, like myself, watch it repeatedly.

Which, by the way, is one of the keys to understanding Antonioni: view his films at least a half-dozen times a piece, before rushing to any mad, espresso-inspired conclusions. Let them wash over you in various states and shades of receptivity. They are long meditations as much as they are films. Examine them for their dimensions of art, entertainment, depths of all sorts, and for the relationships of these dimensions to each other. Quite the mind-training, profitable exercise, I can assure. No extra charge for the amount of sensibility deepening they can cause in you, nor the firmness of mind they can challenge and foster in you, if you watch them right.

I don't understand the complaints of 'washout' colors in this film. Viewed on decent equipment, it should look great. To me, watching this film just for its sheer aesthetics, can be like dying and going to heaven. However, to each his own. . .

Perhaps the beauty of 'Il Desserto Rosso' IS of the stark, minimalist 60s variety. No matter. With the way the director has framed -- and paced -- the shots in RED DESERT, even if the film wasn't in color, it would still be very beautiful.

Which doesnt mean this film isnt overwhelming and disturbing, as much of Antonioni's work is. Don't come to Antonioni to use him as a tool to entertain and distract(though he can do that also.)

If it helps, Antonioni may mean different things to each viewer. This is perhaps for the best. As some say of certain aspects of poetry, they cannot be taught: they are best discovered on one's own.

For better understanding of this film, see Cassavete's WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, and compare.

I cannot say enough about the inherent intelligence of this film. Every scene, the nature of Antonioni's pacing, the length with which he lingers on a shot, the sort of script he uses, and the way he has his actors speak their lines -- bespeaks a kind of maturity and intelligence that is a credit to the director, and a flattery to the viewer.

RED DESERT is, in its own way, a rivetting breath of fresh air. It is a distinct clearing of the senses, to experience a beautiful, mature, intelligent film that treats viewers as though they were grown-ups complete with fully-functioning brains.

One way to appreciate/perspect the value of this film, is to consider that it was made just two years after Antonioni's better-known black and white film L'AVVENTURA was declared one of the 'Top Ten Films of All Time' in the famous 'Sight and Sound' film magazines' critics poll.

I have already implied how privileged and gratified one ought to feel at being presented the gift of Antonioni's world of color (he uses Goethe's theory of color, by the way.)

Go ahead. Rent this film. You'll then know what I mean. And you will want to OWN a copy. You'll see it's worth the price for the chance to always have this film around just to relish its sheer beauty and color at intervals. I wish everyone the rare cinematic pleasure this film has afforded me.

It is sad to reflect that many otherwise intelligent people, only know Antonioni (when they know him at all) through his BLOW-UP (1966.) Failure to familiarize oneself with his early 60s work ( aka the Antonioni tetralogy, if you include RED DESERT)leaves one not only shortchanged in one's capacity to appreciate BLOW-UP. It robs one also of one of the most significant, mind-and capacity-improving cultural experiences one could have, at this stage of the game.

(HINT: I own two different VHS prints of this beautiful masterpiece. Sense the dedication: its called, Practice What You Preach.)

This film is as stark as they come. It begins with lingering shots of an industrial waste land and a confused Monica Vitti wandering aimless within it. Vitti we slowly find out has had some sort of break down and each sequence of the film serves to elaborate the distance she has fallen away from reality. She attempts to find relief from her mental anguish by having an affair with a man who seems to intuitively understand her but the affair does not bring peace to her troubled state of mind. Though Antonioni's first color film this is not what I would call a "beautiful" film. What is striking about Antonionis use of color is how he uses it like a painter uses color and thats to express emotions. For instance Richard Harris' apartment has grey walls but the morning after when Vitti wakes up the walls are a soft pink. It is a striking effect to use colors to describe emotional states. Perhaps this is the scene the other reviewer found to be "beautiful". Most of the film is striking only because it is so stark. Never before or since has any film maker lingered on such ugly things like smoke stacks and industrial waste and the rusting hulls of ships as Antonioni does here. Antonioni purposely makes the world ugly in order to stress that for Vitti at least the world feels uninhabitable. I can think of three great films in the 1960's that dealt with a womans breakdown: Bergman's Persona, Polanski's Repulsion, and this one. Polanski no doubt admired Antonionis color palette and in Rosemary's Baby applies some of the same techniques. I think perhaps the people who will most enjoy this film will be lovers of modern painting, especially European painters of the post war period like Tapies--a painter whose work is often evoked in this film as well as other Antonioni films. Antonioni composes his shots like a painter and is ever sensitive to the way his figures are defined by what he surrounds them with as much as what they do or say. Always an interesting experience to watch an Antonioni but his films do take patience and are definitely for people who already have a taste for existential meditation whether it be in the novel, the museum or in the cinema. I would not suggest starting with this film if you are new to this director. L'Avventura and La Notte are the two I would begin with.

I first saw this film in an Italian Cinema class and it took my breath away. It is proof of what cinema can do and be...engaging, powerful, and difficult to categorize. I cannot express the effect Antonioni's film has had on shaping my understanding of art and its possiblities. Monica Vitti is luminous, the photography is stunning, and the delicate pace with which the film unfolds is pure genius. The soundtrack, with its use of industrial noise and distortion interwoven throughout should be of particular interest to those of you who appreciate "modern" music and experimental forms. Antonioni's 1965 film remains as fresh and as innovative today as it did then.

The first Opus in color of Michelangelo Antonioni is not an easy going film to watch. It is extremely meticulous and harrowing picture. For the first time the rarefied atmosphere of the industrial processes, the marshy environment, the unbearable machines sound, the cloudy weather originated from industrial remainders, the overpopulation metaphor in the trailer, and the grind existential has never been expressed in the screen with such visual power and cynicism.
This gradual alienation has transformed the most of persons who, accustomed to live there in that poisoning surrounding do not perceive anything altered. But this woman seems hard to adapt herself to that oppressive reality:
She is under the rational perspective, to be on the verge of the madness. Her unstoppable schizophrenia and ontological loneliness, makes of her an isolated human being and the inner desolation is simply, a translation of the wrecking environmental degradation.
This towering movie remains as an island film through the years. It's a bold film hard to swallow and assimilate because it hurts.
The final speech between Monica Vitti and his son is one of the most demolisher, sordid, troubling, and brutally bitter in the cinema's story.
Indeed, the little birds know it and they chose to ignore that way.

It is fitting that L. Maltin thinks this movie is boring. Most people would agree. Sorry, there are no explosions or other sparkling lights in this movie -- but if you appreciate great photography you will enjoy it. Don't think of Antonioni's movies as 'movies;' you'll just be bored if you do. They are movies in the oldest sense of the term: "moving pictures."

I like Antonioni the best among all great Italian cinema directors for many reasons. Everything he makes is so visually pleasing... every second is like a perfect photography, in color or in black/white. His use of jazz music in film is so perfect, as one can see in his Blow-up. And his characters are so real, especially women. Unlike Fellini's grotesque women trapped in men's views and stereotypes, Antonioni's female characters are so real, independent, honest, yet very feminine. Red Desert is not his best film but yet beautiful. Again, it is a story about a real woman acted by beautiful Vitti who has difficulties accepting the world around her and who realizes it. I just wish more Antonioni films were available in the US -- la notte, the passengers (with Jack Nicolson and Maria Schneider) and girlfriends are all beautiful.