167 - Red Desert, 1964, Italy. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Friday, June 16, 2017

167 - Red Desert, 1964, Italy.  Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Never mind taking two pills and calling me in the morning.

Love something.

That is the doctors' prescription for Giuliana.

Love something.

Well, we--through the eyes of Corrado Zeller--do not yet know that the prescription is for Giuliana.

She says it is for another woman.  She met this woman, see.  At the hospital.  When she was staying there.  After the car accident.  A kind of acquaintance.  A fellow patient.  A friend.  You know.

Her husband Ugo wonders what went wrong with her.  Normally she is a decent driver.  But for some reason she has just lost it.

Or maybe he does not understand her.

She is, after all, quite sensitive.

Regardless, she cannot come out and tell Corrado--her husband's industrial colleague--that the prescription was for her, so she tells him it was for a fellow female patient.

Love something.

A man.  A husband.  A son.  A dog.  Anything.  Love it.

She is willing to follow doctors' orders.

So she looks around for something to love.

She does have her son in tow.

And she does love him.

It is just that, well, somehow maybe that is not enough.  She remains always dutiful to him.  But detached.

She needs to love something.

How about Corrado?

He seems interested in listening to her.

Maybe she could love him.

At least she may get points for trying.

Giuliana begins the film in an olive knee-length overcoat with light-brown pumps and a black clutch. Her son wears a saddle-colored overcoat with dark knee-high boots.

And they stand against a backdrop of industrial color.

The last time we saw textures this rich and numerous, we may have been watching the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

This film is a visual feast.

It seems to be an all-out meditation on texture.  And design.  And architecture.  And composition. And perspective.  And color.

And the action follows the interior life of Giuliana.

We would not be surprised to find it reviewed in Architectural Digest.  Or Modern Psychology.

The interior spaces of the buildings correspond to the interior spaces in her heart and mind.

Will she be okay?

Will society be okay?

Or, as Antonioni himself observed, is it more about adapting?  People struggle during the changes in epochs, but some learn to adapt.

And find beauty in industry.  In the machinery.

Beauty in the smokestack.  Beauty in the smoke.

This was the last of four films in a row that Michelangelo Antonioni made with Monica Vitti.  They would move apart.  And then make one more film together years later.

It was also his first color film.  And he invested a lot into it.  And it shows.

It stars a young Richard Harris.  If you know him mostly for his mature work, he may not look familiar to you.  Although he was well established by this point.

This was the last of this group of films for Antonioni.  Films that meditated on this kind of restlessness of modern man.  He would continue to explore certain themes but would move on to a different kind of work, for which he would be known by a different and broader audience.  Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1975).

We will not see these films on this go-around, but we do have one more Antonioni film to go.

Stay tuned. . . .