The story of Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni's final film has the merit of a linear simplicity. A woman, the wife of an industrialist of Ravenna, after a car accident, hath been sick with nerves. To say that is neurotic is an understatement, we are almost at the point of insanity. The lady suffers especially in a continuous feeling of fear. All the terror strikes: the factory of her husband, the health of the child, his loneliness, relationships with people, nature and things. Capita in Ravenna, a young entrepreneur looking for technicians to set up a factory in Argentina. He, he, too, which seems to suffer the same anguish, is a bit 'of the court the woman who, in a time of crisis (he feared that his son was ill with infantile paralysis) gives him. That's all. a closer look is adultery traditional (so to speak) of the bourgeois type. Adultery that is consumed by anxiety bovaristica. This is not new to Antonioni who comes from middle class and interprets the crisis. If anything new is the explicit use of the neurosis that is a morbid condition that affects more than the medicine that culture, with the correction, however, to project the symptoms on a background, in fact, culture. So Red Desert is the description of a neurosis, as is often the case today, is grafted directly into the source of the historical situation of alienation and capitalist industry. Simple disease at the time of Charcot, neurosis, Antonioni's film, easily becomes the human condition. The fact is that while the neuroses remained as it was, or what the story is usually called history, has run and has moved vested with a meaning that once had.
The comparison with some films of Bergman, however, could enlighten us on the specific nature of the operation of Antonioni. It would then Antonioni is more modern in the sense of Bergman to represent and be part of a society in which the process is more advanced loosely than in the Swedish director. Bergman also describes a neurosis, but while not falling into a kind of positivistic clinical characterization and preserving the cultural implications, provides a natural kind of objective distance between himself and the character. In Red Desert, however, Antonioni is identified with the protagonist. It really is not a character in Antonioni to be afraid but, even with the relaxations and filters your art, Antonioni himself. We will say with this is that Antonioni neurotic? I do not say of course, say instead that there is in him neither the will nor the desire to get out of neurosis, that is, to give a name to the crisis history that he nevertheless clearly indicates that the real cause of the disease. Antonioni stubbornly held within the limits of his character: he wants us to believe that he does not know a point more than his adulterous bourgeois. In this way he manages to escape the temptation is true ideological, but is likely to fall but in the abstraction of a continuous kind of dreamlike wonder.
In Antonioni's film, there are two realities, one for men and that of things. Things moved in the anguish of the men who, perhaps for this reason, are, about the things and drawn, random anecdotes described in weakness.
No human face in Red Desert is so mystical and real as the wall pieces, tubes, the paper and countless other objects on which the goal of Antonioni lingers with a thoughtful attention, luicida, delirious. The fact is that Antonioni sees the world through the eyes of the protagonist, and while this has nurtured relationships with things, has none with men. Antonioni does not want to dirty their hands with psychology, this slurry may only human and so are passionately dedicated to things. Red Desert is without doubt the Italian film in which the color has been used so far with more elegance, plastic capacity, skill, no doubt Antonioni had never done things to say, we allow the pun, so many things. But as in the representation of informal painting and decoration Muslim, it seems sometimes that the human figure in the Red Desert is one too many. Tant 'is that the best parts are those, such as the sequence of the story, in which the action, already tenuous, will stop altogether. Monica Vitti is, with skill and intensity, the main character and we must recognize that his neurosis was credible and yet does not compromise the sincerity of the violence and brief love affair. Beside her, Richard Harris, the lover, a difficult part, manages to be very effective. Alberto Moravia
L'Espresso
1/11/1964
0 comments:
Post a Comment