Red Desert (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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"Red Desert" (1964) is Antonioni's first venture into color film. The film is about a neurotic woman (Monica Vitti) who has been in a car accident and is having trouble adjusting to the new industrial world that is the post-war Italy. The film beautifully photographs the industrial world with its architectural monoliths and poisonous pools of water and yellow clouds of smoke. The Russian director Tarkovsky would take some of his cues from this movie when he went on to film "Stalker". Antonioni was influenced by the abstract American artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and Antonioni often employs various techniques to flatten the visual space using the telephoto lens, and atmospheric effects, like fog. In this way the environments are made to be just as important as the characters who inhabit them. Antonioni would even spray paint the ground and the trees in order to color thelandscape to fit his vision. At times the realism portrayed appears surreal, and electronic music adds to the alien quality of the industrial environments that the people find themselves surrounded by which sometimes gives the film an almost sci-fi quality. This is an often bleak, but thoughtful film, that portrays a humanity learning to live in a new order surrounded by technology and industry.

This Criterion release is has been beautifully remastered in 1080p, and is in its original monaural in Italian with English subtitles. The aspect ratio is 1.85:1. There is an informative commentary by Italian scholar DAvid Forgacs, as well as archival interviews with Antonioni and Monica Vitti. There are also two short documentaries by Antonioni: Gente del Po, and N.U., plus a booklet with an essay by film writer Mark Le Fanu, as well as an interview conducted by Jean-Luc Godard, and writings by Antonioni on Gente del Po and N.U.

Breathtaking images, for the first time Antonioni's career in color. I'd be happy to have still frames from this framed on my wall. But the acting and writing didn't match the power of the images for me, at least on first viewing.

Monica Vitti is a housewife losing her mind, who quickly (and without clear reason) obsesses a badly dubbed Richard Harris, who is visiting Vitti's husband on business. What makes this less powerful for me than L'Venturra and L'Ecisse is here the characters talk a lot more, and a lot of the dialogue is stilted and false sounding; way too full of `meaning' when the images are already so symbolic. And while Vitti is a good actress, she's not Liv Ulmann or Meryl Streep. But where it fails as drama, it's amazing as storytelling through images. Every time everyone shut up, I was immediately drawn back in.