Antonioni’s The Red Desert must rank
high in the list of colour films that most suffer from being seen in a
suboptimal print; not necessarily because the colour provides a clarity
that would otherwise be absent, but because of the very opposite, of the nature
of the film’s particular mystery. It’s arguably rather short on conventional
pleasures (there’s some comparatively racy talk about sex, but no visualization
of it), reflecting a reality that has become overwhelmingly confusing and oppressive;
its use of colour is sometimes a direct appeal to an alternative reality (as in
a story that’s told about a girl on an island) but more often an abstract
representation of the meaning and order that evades us. It’s made explicit in
the damaged central character’s plan of opening a shop, for which the decision
on what she might actually sell comes second to covering the walls with
different paint possibilities; at other times, even such muddled human agency
is denied, and the film takes on a sense of chronic violation, its brandishing
of (or denial of) colour seeming like part of the attack. The ending provides a
note of relative hope, as she muses that the birds would have learned to avoid
a factory’s emissions of hideous (and yet, if the context and content were
different) weirdly beautiful yellow smoke; reflecting a broader sense that
communication between people and their environments is at least possible,
however confusing the progress toward it. But the hope is indeed at best
relative; the search for how to live (essentially the same thing, we’re told,
as the search for how to see) not without lightness, but defined as much by
absence as by presence. The film’s focus on labour practices, upheavals and
shortages suggests that the plight it depicts is at least in part a feature of
modern capitalism and industrialization, a critique that remains urgent and
relevant (even if in a different form now).
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