"Red Desert" is a turning point by Antonioni. Before that, he indulged in purely subjective performance, ignored the traditional narrative rules, rejected the audience's identification with the characters in the film, and created a modern style without plot. In order to express his pessimism and despair towards contemporary Western society, and his distance and indifference to reality, he rejects color. After the filming of "The Trilogy of Human Feelings", Antonioni turned to an objective representation of the world, using the eyes of a neurotic woman in "Red Desert" to reflect the living environment of people in the post-industrial society. His unique discovery of the color function makes the environment the main body of the film, and the heroine's state of existence is no longer purely psychological. Despite Monica Witty’s unsuccessful performance (she failed to express the heroine’s chaotic mood coherently and convincingly, she just followed her laziness in the "Trilogy of Human Feelings" invariably, The trance monotone) and the excessive publicity of the theme of loneliness of modern people have damaged the brilliance of the film. "Red Desert" is still a work with strong artistic charm and innovative spirit.
Color is undoubtedly the main topic when we appreciate this film. At the technical level, two things are quite well known. One is that Antonioni used paint to spray the garbage dump on the location and the fruit on the hawker truck to gray. The second is when Juliana and Corrado are immersed in love in the hotel room in Corrado, the room with brown walls turns pink in a panoramic view. This kind of color correspondence method aimed at directly expressing the protagonist's emotions is not much commendable. What is more interesting is the director's natural use of color in the narrative process. When Juliana and Corrado went to Medicina to find an electrician, against the background of the white sky, a large row of geometrically shaped, red and white antenna racks gleamed in the sun, dotted with the khaki wilderness. The green trees give people a strong sense of beauty and harmony. When the camera zooms in on the workers who are working at heights, the image of the person is blurred. The left half of the screen is filled with a glowing orange-red skeleton, and the right half is a silver-gray steel bar. In Juliana’s shop, what we saw was a wall painted with several different color blocks, because the heroine has not yet figured out what color the wall should be painted. In most of the pictures, whether it is outdoors, in Ugo's factory, or in Juliana's house, the main color is gray-blue, which is as cold as the winter season in the film. In contrast, the desolate assembly in the fishing room, the gray and blue are gone, replaced by red walls and white partitions. In the climax scene of Juliana rushing to Corrado’s hotel room, the color change is particularly eye-catching: the corridor leading to the room is dazzling white, and the audience sees the soft brown when entering the room, but in the room Before turning pink, the camera kept going around the bed and let a bright red bed rail divide the picture into two, blocking the viewer's view.
There are some peculiarities in the use of color in the film. When the heroine wanders in the dirty ecological environment, the exterior wall of the stone house in the background is often covered with colorful, vertical and horizontal sewage ditches, white-washed sewage, and swamps with red grasses. Beautiful stains, sparse pine forests are wrapped in the gray-white mist, the huge gray-blue hull slowly passes through the windows inlaid in the orange-red siding, and the artistic conception is indescribable. It is not an exaggeration that a western critic once said that the color of "Red Desert" has a "rich and disturbing beauty".
It is a pity that Juliana is not a convincing real image.
In Antonioni's early films, writing about the alienation of people in Western post-industrial societies is a common central theme. From the ten women in "Girlfriend" or Irma in "Scream" to Claudia in "Adventure" or Lydia in "Night" or Victoria in "Eclipse", you can say It is the prototype of Juliana, but compared with Juliana, their sense of emptiness, loneliness, and wandering are obviously just a kind of psychological phenomenon, a kind of spiritual feeling, and has nothing to do with pathology. They would not buy a piece of bread from a worker on the road that he had already bitten into. They will not have a strong sense of fear, afraid of everything around them. Juliana's love life is very normal. She doesn't love a man like they do but doesn't know why, she hates a man without knowing why, or even if she loves or not. She plunged into Corrado's arms for a clear reason: her husband didn't care about her. There is a reason for her loneliness. She has obviously been desperately seeking perfect love, so that she has neglected her son, neglected her responsibility as a mother, and forced the little guy to pretend to be paralyzed to win her caress. In fact, we learned from her self-report by "a girl I met in the hospital" that she "feeled that the floor under her feet was gone" before the birth of her son, and even "thought of suicide". When Monica Witty completely used the method of unmotivated behavior when she played Claudia or Victoria to portray Juliana's image, the authenticity of the created image was replaced by the falseness of the screen image. The visible Juliana became incomprehensible. The inner basis of the behavior is not consistent with the outer image of the behavior. The audience cannot believe that Juliana is a schizophrenic patient. The pain she narrates is only voiced lines, because her face, her posture and behavior are so relaxed and unrestrained. Useless. People are like Turkish sailors on the leaning bridge, always looking at this beautiful rather than haggard, wandering rather than heavy-footed young woman with confused eyes, briskly using an incomprehensible language as if to tell her. pain.
The entire filming of "Red Desert" was carried out in the town of Chiasi in Port Ravenna. Therefore, viewers familiar with Italian literature will naturally think that the film may have some connection with Dante’s Divine Comedy, because this place is the prototype of the land described as paradise on earth on top of Dante’s purgatory. Is Antonioni consciously trying to tell people that the Garden of Eden in Dante’s eyes has now been ruined by machine civilization as hell among adults? Someone further speculated that Corrado was based on Dante’s Ulysses, a figure who wandered around in search of an ideal land. Corrado recruited workers in Ravenna for factories as far away as South America, just as Ulysses broke his boat to the top of the mountain in Purgatory.
Another reason why "Red Desert" is Antonioni's turning work is that he left Italy after filming the film and started his creative career in overseas filming.
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