One of my all time favorites.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

The main theme explored in works of a cinema master, Antonioni, and this one is no exception. I watched it 2 years ago. It was my first Antonioni, and didn't really liked it back then so I will not recommend it for entering into the artist work. But maybe it's just me. For entering I will recommend something like Zabriskie Point (my favorite from him) or The Passenger (my second).This is a film about woman (Monica Vitti), a very sensitive one, and beautiful too, living in her world, a very ugly and toxic, a distanced one, filmed with masterful directing and cinematography. It was a director's first colour movie and colours are beautifully placed in this harshly grey environment, especially red. Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse, was great in this film. She is my favourite actress, except maybe Irène Jacob, or maybe Juliette Binoche, or maybe... Well I don't know any Antonioni's movie with her in which she wasn't, at least, great.Don't get fooled because of my rating. I am very strict, very. This is one of Antonioni's best films for me and I will definitely watch it again in years to come.And please, be nicer to the environment.

My film studies professor made us watch this film to understand the essence of the time-image as proposed by Gilles Deleuze. Basically, its a form of cinema wherein the story throughout the film makes not change whatsoever to how it ends. Here, we see Giuliana lost in the world with an unstable mentality and numerous mental breakdowns. At the end, she is still somewhat the same, however there is a minor change mentally, but not outwardly. Hiroshima Mon Amour would also be a perfect example of the time-image as pretty much nothing happens (I was figuratively dying watching that, and died a bit watching this – even the trailer gives multiple mind farts).The acting was awkward, the movements slow and deliberate, and there are lots of times in the film where time just seems to stop. This is intentional, but as a movie buff (of modern times), this does not entertain me.The cinematography was probably the only good thing in this film. Well, maybe some lines were great too. Mainly, everything that was shot (including the colour tinting of scenes) emphasized the inner workings of Giuliana's mind. That she feels like she is alone and doesn't belong anywhere. She clings to the walls when she walks, she sits next to a slanted cart that shows how she is out of balance with the world, and there are shots (mainly one that I can think of) where she is literally out of focus. She is like a red desert, 'red' perhaps alluding to her anxiety of feeling this way, and 'desert' referring to her solitude.Also, I do like the ending because it serves as a metaphor that she's found a way to keep on living with her disoriented mentality. Those ending lines were great. Oh and that one scene in the second half of the film about a story of a girl on an island, though totally random as it is, was interesting.Read more movie reviews at: championangels.wordpress.com

Red Desert is a film that I believe is not a simple character study, it is an apocalyptic notion of the future in shockingly contemporary terms. That aspect of Antonioni's purely other-worldly and futuristic filmmaking is what makes the film so shocking in its moral statements and so provocative in its overall design. Antonioni uses color masterfully and creates for us a world of industrial mechanics, bleakly emphasizing his apocalyptic terms through a simple woman looking for love in her loveless environment. The characters are merely symbols and rather than the images emphasizing characters I believe that the characters are merely human identifications of his world of doom, which is shockingly contemporary in even today's modern world.

"There's something terrible in reality," Guiliana (Monica Viti) tells Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) towards the end of the film. This statement encapsulates Viti's character perfectly. Guiliana is withdrawn, has bouts of anxiety and paranoia. She had previously been in a car accident involving a van and been hospitalised for a year with serious shock. This role is played beautifully by Viti (who had collaborated with Antonioni on his three previous films); whilst she strikes the occasional contorted pose, she uses her eyes majestically to portray a fractured, anxious thought process. If her eyes are not frantically darting around, encapsulating immaculate confusion, then they are sunken, glacial, and permeated with sadness.Guiliana is married, but on meeting her, Corrado seems almost infatuated with her awkward, unstable demeanour. They enter into a subdued affair that is restrained by her seemingly perpetual elusiveness. She is haunted by details - that we have no awareness - of the road accident. It could also be argued that Guiliana is affected by the surroundings she inhabits. The film is set in Ravenna, an industrialised, bleak landscape of factories; chimneys pumping out fumes, infecting the horizon with a dense fog. All that is left of the natural surroundings of field and trees, is the bare-bones of rotten, forgotten husks. The once-green grass churned into slurry. The infected waters, yellow and frothing as the waves hit the poisonous rocks.This was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in colour. The last in a loose tetralogy informed with themes of alienation in the modern, industrialised world. Red Desert was preceded by L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). Whilst much of the landscape filmed here, the overall effect of the visuals is astonishingly beautiful. These stark, brooding images stay with you. Whilst the natural colours (dissipated by the onslaught of industrial waste infecting the air) are washed out by heavy pollution, Antonioni lightly daubs his mise-en-scene with slight painterly strokes of colour (often out-of-focus) across the composition with a mass-produced object of manufactured descent.The theme of the relationship between the polluting element of the manufacturing industry with human emotion is open to interpretation in this film. Do we see these objects of consumerist desires that illuminate the screen with their intensely garish, gauche, fabricated colours, as the fundamental fascination with the industrial age? Are we, like Guiliana, so totally absorbed by our modernist surroundings that we find solace in the objects that this modern industrial age has produced? Any film that is open to new ideas excites me. A film that can be represented with new adaptation of thought. Our understanding of technology, and the changing face of industrialisation/globalisation will undoubtedly change, as I am sure will the interpretations of this beautifully constructed piece of cinema/art.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com