After a year of constant embarrassment, I finally took a my first foray into the work of Michelangelo Antonioni with Red Desert; it wouldn’t have been ideal to start from the beginning of his filmography, but a brand new 35mm restoration was playing at the George Eastman House.
I can’t write anything comprehensive about the film. Sure, the colors are gorgeous, I mean, these reds and blues with strong, vivid values - completely saturated yet disguised by the barren landscapes of industrialization that have in fact muted them. Godard’s Pierre le Fou is one of the few films I have found to share the range of value, but compared to Red Desert the pop-art sensibility is one sided. Yet the industrial holds a distinct beauty in it’s own such as the green fog constantly hovering over Monica Vitti. It truly is one of the most visually stunning films I have seen, and don’t get me started on the clarity of the print.
It’s an entrancing film at that one that discusses the desire to resist change, even to go to great lengths to recreate the past. The fact of the matter is that the world is dynamic and you must adjust to it, whether you like it or not. Of the recent films I’ve seen, Farewell my Concubine deals with this a bit, but only as a background for character relationships.
I would go further, but my focus was distracted by a couple of things in the theatre. A skinny old man behind me kept rubbing himself. Rubbing his arms, rubbing his legs - he just kept rubbing through the whole movie. Another old man a few rows down kept falling asleep and snoring obnoxiously. Because of that, I missed a few crucial details that would allow me to write a more comprehensive list of thoughts and warrants the film a required second viewing.
Perhaps the idea that struck me most was when the son of Monica Vitti’s character asks her, “what’s 1 + 1?”
Only one lesson from Bible-private-high-school was relevant for me. The world is clean, there are no humans. A bird flies by and drops a rock. A second bird flies by and drops a rock. Even though there are no human beings, or values or beliefs or anything to a further extent, there are still two rocks, are they not?
I was always under the impression that despite the world being a chaotic place where absolutely nothing is certain, numbers are the only truth out there. They are infinite, and because of that, time is infinite and the universe is infinite. Two rocks are two rocks, no matter what.
It took a single line of dialogue from a child to change a perception I have held for years.
