Red Desert

A film about a woman lost in an endlessly modernizing world, at a time when technological advancement is supposed to benefit humanity, but at the same time can quickly turn against it and crush it with its vastness, even if not literally, then at least internally. Perhaps Monica Vitti felt something similar, realizing her insignificance compared to the giant factories, towering towers, or rushing trucks. Her hypersensitive soul, inevitably generating fear for everything close to her, does not fit into this world, where everything is constantly on the move and where it cannot hold on firmly. She would like to somehow reverse the scales back to the state when she was close to people, to bring back the intimacy between them, instead of the measurements of her industrial epoch, in which humans are powerless and tiny compared to their creations, mere servants and maintainers of something they have created but no longer control. (09/25/2012)

Antonioni does not belong among my favorite directors, even though he uses truly beautiful colors here. The theme itself resonated with me quite well, but his presentation simply does not captivate me. I can't help it, but Europe just doesn't sit well with me in this period, even though films from this time are highly acclaimed. (05/14/2015)

Uninteresting, tedious and about nothing. Thank God that Antonioni stopped his emotional soap opera after this fourth episode, because the quality and symbolic eloquence fades from film to film, and there’s nothing in this world that would make me want to spend another two hours in the company of similarly cold, detached and weird characters. At least Monica Vitti and Richard Harris are both good enough actors that they somehow managed to find each other in this pseudo-intellectual wasteland and were watchable... (12/01/2015)