| Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo
Chionetti, Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir, Aldo Grotti, Lili Rheims
Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable
talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti.
Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed
form of depression and malaise. Her quicksilver emotional shifts
disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing
is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris)
seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he
acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman.
Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental
pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the
conventional sense. Monica Vitti's sense of isolation is heightened
by Antonioni's (and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's) choice of colors,
and especially by Carlo Savina's bizarre electronic musical score.
This is a landmark movie in Antonioni's effort to portray alienated
individuals in contemporary life; he places people against towering
forms of technology to emphasize their smallness and lostness in
the modern world of technological change. |