{"id":9169,"date":"2014-06-27T20:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-28T01:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=9169"},"modified":"2014-06-21T23:18:06","modified_gmt":"2014-06-22T04:18:06","slug":"red-desert-1964-michelangelo-antonioni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/9169","title":{"rendered":"Red Desert (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s something terrible about reality.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Another wonderful-looking Antonioni movie: characters full of ennui, atrocious dubbing and subtle electronic music by Vittorio Gelmetti.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert6.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Monica Vitti (a couple years after <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/277\">Avventura<\/a><\/em>\/<em>Notte<\/em>\/<em>Eclisse<\/em>) starts out acting homeless and desperate, begging (actually buying) a sandwich off a striking worker and devouring it behind some trees.  Turns out she&#8217;s comfortably married to factory owner Ugo, but she seems to have whatever Julianne Moore had in <em>Safe<\/em> mixed with run-of-the-mill bored-housewife craziness (husband says she hasn&#8217;t been quite right since a car accident).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert4.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Zeller (Richard Harris of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2856\">Caprice<\/a><\/em>, which probably isn&#8217;t how most folks remember him) is the new guy in town, meeting Ugo inside a rackety, color-coded steam-spewing factory to talk about replacing the strikers.  Soon enough the three of them are joining a bald friend and two other women at a would-be-orgy at a beach house (actually a red shack over a polluted river).  Monica thinks she&#8217;ll open a shop, is painting the place but still doesn&#8217;t know what she will sell, tries to confide her feelings in a somewhat ambiguous Harris.  I&#8217;m not sure what it all meant, but Antonioni shoots the hell out of it, in hazy, polluted color.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert7.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>From the film within the film: a story told to Vitti&#8217;s son:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert5.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Criterion says it&#8217;s a &#8220;look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age&#8221;, &#8220;a nearly apocalyptic image of its time&#8221;.  M. Le Fanu:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Red Desert is the most ambitious of all of Antonioni&#8217;s attempts to ground the condition of our modern existence in a theory of alienation&#8230; on the one hand, Antonioni would say, the world being created by the advance of technology is undoubtedly beautiful: we see it in the fantastic structural shapes thrown up by science and industry&#8230; on the other hand &#8211; and here the pounding soundtrack of the film&#8217;s opening ten minutes makes its inescapable comment &#8211; this new world is very close to hell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/reddesert2.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s something terrible about reality.&#8221; Another wonderful-looking Antonioni movie: characters full of ennui, atrocious dubbing and subtle electronic music by Vittorio Gelmetti. Monica Vitti (a couple years after Avventura\/Notte\/Eclisse) starts out acting homeless and desperate, begging (actually buying) a sandwich off a striking worker and devouring it behind some trees. Turns out she&#8217;s comfortably married [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[410,140,1160],"class_list":["post-9169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1960s","tag-michelangelo-antonioni","tag-monica-vitti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9169"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9186,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9169\/revisions\/9186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}