In 1964, Italy's economy had not yet fully recovered, and it was not far from the bleak and dilapidated Italy at the bottom of the Neorealist movement. The sensitive and avant-garde Antonioni, who came from the middle class, showed people a picture of the late capitalist era in advance. Red Desert is set in an industrial city in northern Italy. At the beginning of the film, the tongues of fire over the factory are regularly and arrogantly spitting out, and the sound of the tongues of fire filling the entire sound space is annoying. The film objectively shows us a silhouette of a heavy industrial factory in the form of newsreel footage: huge chimneys, traversing iron bridges, gray and eroded factories, huge and formidable machines; of colors, Monica. The heroine played by Vitti appears in a dark grass green coat. This is the first touch of color in the film. As Antonioni's first color film, the film was called the first "true color film" by Western critics, who felt that the film's use of color had a "rich, disturbing beauty" . An's work has always been against a coherent narrative, and the film is largely underpinned by color, sound, and character performance (specifically, that of Monica Vitti, although her performance in the film has great controversy). Garbage dumps in factories and fruit on hawker carts are painted gray; streets and house walls are a deserted gray; steel pipes are painted bright red and white when Corrado and Giuliana travel to Medicina to find electricians ; Correspondingly is the interior scene of the fishing house. The over-painted red and white partitions make the picture overflowing, bringing people into an unreal space of indulgence at once, highlighting the eroticism in the cramped space. Flowing and unbearable; and most of the time, the film is dominated by dull earthy yellows and gloomy grey-blues. When the figure appears in the outdoor factory area, the color of the exposed, uneven soil fills the face painting, giving the impression that the project is always in progress but never seems to be completed. The characters are exposed to a great desolation, decay, and the threat of a sense of uncertainty. In the protagonist's home, the color is a cool, decorative, decadent gray-blue. The hostess is about to open a shop. The location of the shop is in an empty basement. The interior walls are painted in several colors of pale pink, pink purple and indigo. The woman is hesitant about which color to choose, and she is troubled by this. In the so-called climax of the film, the scene where Juliana and Corrado have sex, the bed frame is a disturbingly bright red, and the next morning a subjective shot is used to render Corrado's hotel room as a warm A dreamy pink, but equally unreal, Because Juliana is destined to be unable to find comfort and salvation from Corrado. The use of sound in the film is also unique. The noise from the factory is harsh and annoying, but it has a source after all. The murmur from Juliana's hallucination, however, has a mysterious, surreal undertone, with an unexplained horror effect. The two groups of voices intertwined and referred to each other, creating a disused, heart-devouring effect, which reflected Juliana's silent, incapable, and on the verge of collapse.
Ships, fog, Ferrara
and the rest is fog. I'm used to it, the fog that surrounds our fantasies and the fog of Ferrara. Here, I like to take a walk in the street when it's foggy in winter. That was the only time I could imagine myself being somewhere else.
——"Bowling Alley on the Tiber"
Movies about the wind in the fog are always fascinating. The fog of Angelopoulos is accompanied by the endless road, sea, river, lonely tree on the bank, and the music of bagpipes. Telling a story about the pursuit of a young man. In contrast, Antonioni's fog is more hopeless, gloomy, and restless, reflecting middle-aged hardship and lost identity. In the fog, Juliana and the others faced off against each other, and were quickly covered up by the thickening fog, and the protagonist immediately fell into a kind of helplessness and despair. It can be said that the fog always carries the color of mystery and nostalgia. In the fog, everything loses its original shape and color, and everything becomes amorphous, as if it may dissipate at any time as it may be liquefied. The connection between fog and nostalgia may be because nostalgia also has a fog-like, wispy, thin, dense and moist but lingering shape. Think of Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia" again, and the image of the native Russia is also in such a thin and smoky mist. Perhaps the most nostalgic thing is the mystery itself, the place where we think we "come from" and "go back."
After watching "Red Desert", of course we know that there is no desert in the film. On the contrary, the whole film was shot in a seaside city. Juliana seems to have an indescribable affection for ships. In the film, the sailing ship first represents fear, and the sailing ship with a white flag is raised to represent the epidemic patients on board, which creates a real panic, and it is also a new stimulation to Juliana's psychology, but it is also a new kind of provocation. . We see Juliana board a boat at the end of the film and ask the boatman to take her away, but there is obviously an insurmountable communication barrier between her and the boatman, and Juliana also realizes that she can't leave the past like Corrado because she is not "can't choose life", but "can't choose herself". In stark contrast to the first two impressions, in the story Juliana told her son, a girl alone on an island saw a beautiful sailboat. It might symbolize a hope, but when the girl swam to it, trying to chase it, it suddenly turned and drove away, as if it had never been there. And in this part of the island, the girl heard a strange and wonderful sound coming from the sea. This slender and clear female voice, like a siren singing, also appears in the title of the film. This beautiful song, like the story about the girl, exists in a woman's imagination, or rather, a woman's alter ego. It's just that this self can never be presented, just as this song can only come from the illusory bottom of the sea. This complex arrangement is reminiscent of the beginning of "Still in the Mirror", except that Bergman's film goes further and his characters emerge from the sea. Going back to the sailboats and the singing in Red Desert, like all Antonioni movies, there is always hope, but it never refuses to be captured. This is Antonioni's despair.
The 'women who were on the verge of breaking down'
Antonioni's earlier films wrote about the alienation of humans in a post-industrial society, presented in the form of a group of women on the brink of mental breakdown. I haven't seen any of "Girlfriend", "Night", "Eclipse", so I can't give a general review of these women, nor can I rate Monica Vitti's performance in "Red" ( At some point her performance does seem contrived and disconnected), then the more interesting and accessible contrast is Almodóvar's film. Almodovar has created more images of women who are insane and almost collapsed. He is undoubtedly a director who pays more attention to women, and can even be said to be a woman-centered director. However, Almodóvar's films are typical of Spanish precariousness, and even if they tell despair, they always have a warm and euphoric tone, as bright and clean as flamenco steps or bullfighting capes. This despair is a kind of joy after death. With Antonioni, despair is despair, and there is no way out. He, like his characters, gave up fighting. Perhaps because An Shi was too sensitive, wise and intellectual, with an intellectual humility and prudence, he could never be as strong and unrestrained as Almodovar. In the film, the only scene with lewdness and indulgence takes place in a fishing room by the sea. Three men and three women drink and have fun and destroy wanton images with a group image. When she returns to Juliana herself, she will never be able to solve her own desires. and the need for attention and boundary issues. Perhaps in An's place, these "women on the verge of mental breakdown" are not suffering from desire, but suffering from self. They are not prostitutes, but women who cannot find their own meaning and value in the post-industrial city.
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