——If Thoreau
were to name this city from its essence, I would like to call it the "floating capital". The city is floating on this land, people are floating in this city, we are all rootless. The house was built quickly, the house was built high, and yet we were displaced. There are factories everywhere, only the roar of machines can be heard, drowning out the voices between people. The towering chimneys kept spewing thick black smoke, and the sky was gray, covering the city floating on the ground. Our spiritual home is constantly sinking in the desert of urban material civilization, and we have become strangers on the earth.
In the thick smoke, Julianne pulled her child through a field of heavy industry, only to hear the loud roar of machinery. Because no amount of rich material foundation can fill the void in her heart, Julianne, who has no worries about food and clothing, insists on spending money to buy half-eaten bread from others. She left the child who was amazed by this move, and ran to the deserted suburbs alone and devoured it. During the period, she suddenly stopped and stared at the mountains of industrial waste with a kind of despairing eyes...
Julianne's husband is an entrepreneur. He is busy all day, living indifferently and peacefully. He symbolizes those groups that are mechanically numb and have no pursuit of spirituality in real life. In life and emotion, they are rational and indifferent. For his wife's neurotic restlessness and panic, he only regarded it as a sequelae of the car accident. In the middle of the night, Julianne woke up from a nightmare. She hugged her husband and said helplessly, "I dreamed that I was in bed, the bed was moving, I saw me sleeping on the desert, and the sand was sinking, getting deeper and deeper..." However, the emotional alienation between people caused by modern industrial civilization makes Julianne feel no warmth even in the arms of her husband, and can't get out of the mental and emotional predicament. She shivered from time to time, hugged herself tightly, and stretched out her hands nervously, hugging the pillar or leaning against the wall. But neither the husband, the pillars nor the walls could dispel the unease in her heart, nor could she find a little support for her spirit.
If we say that under the erosion of material civilization, our spiritual fertile soil has been eroded into a desert, then how can we rebuild a magnificent spiritual building and a warm home in this desert? To this question, Antonioni's answer in "Red Desert" is as pessimistic as ever: all pursuits, all struggles are in vain. Even if Julianne tried to love, to love someone or something, but in the face of the chronic diseases of the times, how pale and incompetent love is. Although she has children and a husband, this has not become her spiritual support and sustenance. She still asked helplessly: "Why do I always need someone else?" Perhaps it was this need that made her slowly approach her husband's colleague and eventually cheat on him. However, this kind of seeking is futile. What her husband failed to give her, she did not get from her lover. In this red desert full of corpses, she is still sinking a little bit, getting deeper and deeper, and she will not be redeemed from anyone or anything. If at the beginning of the film, Julianne was holding a little hope, then after some struggle and seeking, the hope was extinguished, and the days had to go on. She held her child and entered life again calmly and desperately.
Antonioni's "Red Desert" is a visual portrayal of the alienation of human beings by modern industry, and a mirror that reflects the spiritual predicament of people in the industrial age. In this mirror, the situation of our lives and spirits in this age is so clearly discernible.
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