Word: vitti
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...DESERT. Against a bleak industrial landscape near Ravenna, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, La Notte) explores the neurotic problems of a young wife (Monica Vitti) and, frame by frame, fills his first color film with precisely shaded insights and breathtaking beauty...
...DESERT. Against bleak industrial landscape near Ravenna, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, La Notte) explores the neurotic problems of a young wife (Monica Vitti) and, frame by frame, fills his first color film with precisely shaded insights and breathtaking beauty...
...remarkable opening sequence, the film states its entire problem and much of its plot in one awesome metaphor: a young woman in green (Monica Vitti) stands staring desolately across acres of black sludge. Obviously in a state of shock, she has recently attempted suicide following a minor auto accident. But there is no comfort to be had, for here within walking distance of Dante's tomb sprawls a 20th century Inferno. Above her, towering smokestacks throw flame into the sky, while the pipelines of industrial Ravenna belch steam onto the wasted earth...
Story is seldom Antonioni's first concern, and in Red Desert he seems keener to offer Actress Vitti's jumpy, hyper-tense performance as an almost clinical study of neurosis. She is inspiringly alienated, for that sturdy cliché dissolves into a rich flow of images that astonish the eye. At one moment, a street scene goes entirely grey-including a vendor, his cart, fruit and all. When Vitti awakes in panic at night to find a toy robot clacking around her glacially modern home as though it had a will of its own, the very walls become...
Clearly, Château cannot stand on its plot alone. But Vadim goes farther to bring it to sure ruin by translating high comedy into languid boudoir farce. Time and again he sacrifices wit, worldliness and style to make room for a blonde (Vitti) in a bed sheet-the Vadim trademark-then repeats the obligatory routine with a brunette (Hardy). What he conveys, at last, is a boyish conviction that these bored, civilized votaries of pleasure might be just the sort for a fun weekend, but no longer. Sagan's sidelong glance at the enigma of women, in Vadim...