WTF????

It's about an unhappy wife who suffers from an unnamed form of depression and malaise, who tries to find meaning in life. it's a very existential art film. the characters are alienated individuals in contemporary life and placed against towering forms of technology to emphasize their smallness and lostness in the modern world of technological change.

"A film you can explain in words is not a successful film" /M. Antonioni.
Meaning: you don't need an exact explanation, particularly not from someone else. You either liked it or not, and if you did, the images and feelings will stay with you, or it will inspire you to think, etc., and that's it, really.

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Antonioniennui cranked up to the max, distilled and placed in an even more ominously oppressive surroundings than previously. Giulietta´s line "There´s something terrible about reality... and I don´t know what it is" sums it - as well as more or less the entire Antonioni´s body of work - up pretty accurately.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

I watched this movie for the first time myself last night and wondered the same thing.

Then I watched parts of it with the commentary on.

The movie was just a vehicle in which antonioni used to experiment with color film and his heavy use of filters on the lenses.

Although the plot is simple, I don't think the move really "means" anything.

It's about how unbearable life can be. Giuliana says it all by stating this and, near the end, that whatever happens to her only happens to her. This is her life, she has to make the best out of it for herself.
"When you pinch someone, it doesn't hurt for you."
This is her way of saying that she has to deal with the pain she feels, as others might not.
We all have our wounds and some of them don't heal, we simply learn to live with them.

If you really want to find a bigger theme, I'd say it's about human beings being able to adapt to their surroundings. Even Antonioni adapts to the new era by experimenting with colour, even painting fruit grey to give us a very subjective introspection of Giuliana's perspective JUST LIKE Giuliana is painting the walls in her future shop to see how they work together. I don't know if today we can always find ourselves in these themes because we are raised in a different world, filled with different media and colour seldomly being exceptional. I do feel a certain resonance with Antonioni though, especially his colour films. It's as if almost any artist dealing with film or photography from that era felt that colour film was superficial and too close to life in order to create something that resembled it so they made it the way they felt like it was yet as a spectator it feels amazingly grand. As if they finally can grasp how abstract life is, that so many words we speak are just blurts of noise when compared to the actions that emphasize or contradict them. I feel deeply with this, Giuliana is overwhelmed by this new world we're entering, even the yellow smoke screams at her yet at the end it feels different. She has come to the point she can accept it even when she's the only one hearing it. There are so many possibilities (like the women in the RED room in the shack), which one to pick? Which ones are right? Wouldn't you feel overwhelmed if anywhere you looked there is something that tells you what to do, what to think, what to feel? I know it sounds neurotic, it probably is.

One last thing, Antonioni didn't use Red Desert as a title unintentionally. Red is a colour of love (acceptance) but also of blood, wounds, vulnerability.