Red Desert

UPC: 715515058216

Studio: Criterion

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:[Adult Situations, Questionable for Children]

Summary: Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti. Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed form of depression and malaise. Her quicksilver emotional shifts disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman. Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the conventional sense. Monica Vitti's sense of isolation is heightened by Antonioni's (and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's) choice of colors, and especially by Carlo Savina's bizarre electronic musical score. This is a landmark movie in Antonioni's effort to portray alienated individuals in contemporary life; he places people against towering forms of technology to emphasize their smallness and lostness in the modern world of technological change. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Category: Drama

Awards: Golden Lion – Venice International Film Festival

Features: Audio commentary by Italian film scholar David Forgacs
Archival interviews with director Michelangelo Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti
Two short documentaries by Antonioni: gente del po, about a barge trip down the Po river, and nu about urban street cleaners
Dailies from the original production
Theatrical trailer
Plus: a booklet featuring an essay by film writer Mark Le Fanu, a reprinted interview with Antonioni conducted Jean-Luc Godard, and writings by Antonioni on gente del po and nu

Red Desert

Format: Blu-ray

Release Date: 06/22/2010

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Theatre Wide-Screen

Runtime: 117 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Subtitles: English

Region: Blu-ray region A (North America, Central America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia)

Lucia Bozzola

In his first color film, Michelangelo Antonioni expressively visualized the inner turmoil of a well-heeled wife as she tries to put her life together after a nervous breakdown. Beginning with the title sequence of an out-of-focus factory, Antonioni creates a near-abstract vision of modernity, replete with power stations, radar towers, merchant ships, and stark domestic interiors, drained of natural colors. Monica Vitti's Giuliana inhabits a world of smokestacks belching yellow poison, rotted brown industrial locations occasionally punctuated by brightly painted machinery, and thick gray ocean fogs that contrast sharply with the pristine blue sea and pink sands of her imagined fairy tale. Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's shallow depth of field repeatedly folds Giuliana into the desolate, blurry landscape, yet it emphasizes her alienation by setting her off in sharp focus; she cannot comfortably exist in a world that engulfs her. The dissonant electronic score and soundtrack of noisy machinery enhances the representation of Giuliana's unease. Red Desert's extraordinary deployment of color inspired Federico Fellini, among others, to add color to his experiments with film form, while the legacy of Antonioni's study of environmental female dislocation can be felt most notably in Todd Haynes's Safe (1995), often considered one of the best American movies of the 1990s. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Valerio Baroleschi  Actor 
Bruno Scipioni  Actor 
Michelangelo Antonioni  Director 
Michelangelo Antonioni  Screenwriter 
Tonino Guerra  Screenwriter 
Antonio Cervi  Producer 
Giovanni Fusco  Composer (Music Score) 
Vittorio Gelmetti  Composer (Music Score) 
Monica Vitti  Actor 
Richard Harris  Actor 
Carlo Chionetti  Actor 
Xenia Valderi  Actor 
Rita Renoir  Actor 
Aldo Grotti  Actor 
Lili Rheims  Actor 
Emanuela Pala Carboni  Actor 
Bruno Borghi  Actor 
Beppe Conti  Actor 
Giuliano Missirini  Actor 

Country: France,Italy