Red Desert is a 1964 Italian film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. This film is well-known for its take on the issue of mental health in the age of industrialization and rapid development. In short, it tells the melancholic story of Guiliana who is the wife of an engineer in an Industrial area of Italy. 

The main characters of this film are: Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), an engineer, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), and Corrado (Richard Harris) an associate of Ugo who came to recruit some workers for a mining project.

Guiliana, the protagonist of the film is suffering from intense anxiety issues. She is not at home where everyone around her is perfectly at home. Ugo is an industrial engineer by profession. He knows that his wife is going through a hard time but he seems to be indifferent to her. In fact, he does not do anything special to help his wife who is not able to cope with the pace of modern life and development. He offers all advanced toys for his little son and introduces him to the world of engineering. We come across toys like robot at his home. Ugo, who is very logical and practical about life, does not find any hope in dealing with the problems of his wife which are entirely emotional in nature. He treats her just like a mechanical device which cannot be repaired.

Corrado is a close associate of Ugo who is going through some existential crisis in his own very life. He is searching for happiness in life and thinks that he can be happy if he is constantly on the move without any kind of attachment to any place or person. There is a scene in the film where he is unable to answer the questions concerning the life of the workers who are interested in joining his mining project in Latin America. He seems to be unhappy and alienated in the mechanical world of abundance and development. He gets emotionally connected to the wife of Ugo in a very special way and he understands that Giuliana needs support. He is very empathetic to Giuliana which eventually leads to a romantic relationship between them.


Red Desert is basically an exploration of the anxious life of Guiliana who desperately searches for help. She is going through severe anxiety and panic attacks. She finds that everyone around her enjoys life in the world of industrialization and toxicity. This film is taken from the lens of Giuliana who is in perpetual anxiety. It shows how an anxious person perceives the world and interprets it. An anxious mind is attuned to the painful, sad, and dark aspects of the world. Giuliana sees all the pollution, smoke, and dryness around her all the time. She is constantly sad.
Giuliana wanders around the industrial area where her husband works in order to find a relief for her mental agony. Noting seems to be helping her. She is always spending time alone in isolated desert regions which has no greenery at all. The metaphor of Desert shows the way in which industrialization ruins the biosphere of any particular region. It seems that she does not find anything meaningful in the world. Nothing really matters to her. She even roams around the indoors of shipping companies and industrial companies aimlessly. She meets a sailor of a ship in one of her attempt to find help. We do not know whether Giuliana faces any sexual abuse from the sailor.

Giuliana gets connected to Corrado who is also going through some issues regarding meaning of life. Corrado too appears to be a melancholic person. It seems that when we are melancholic, we get attracted to like-minded people. Intially, Corrado does all that he can do to help Giuliana. He takes her to a village on his drive to recruit a worker to his company. He visits her frequently in order to understand her. He understood that she needs help to get out of anxiety that almost kills her. It seems that Corrado is a great source of help for her in her recovery. Eventually, lust takes over and he seduces her when she comes to spend time with him in his chamber. Corrado could not resist his feelings as Giliana was freaking out with anxiety. In this way, even Corrado fails to give her the kind of support that she needs.

The main focus of the film is the distorted perception of the anxious mind of Giuliana who sees only dark and grey aspects of the reality. The color and beauty of the world is lost in her perception. Her mind is attuned to the melancholic and dark sides of the world. There is a scene about her childhood days where she encounters the clouds of anxiety as she was spending beautiful time in a beach with crystal clear water and pink pebbles and rock. As she is under sun in a place with breathtaking beauty, she encounters the melancholic music of the reality and she tries to pursue the source of the music. She is unable to find its source. She seems to be looking for the source of the music in the rest of the film. The scene from her childhood days, appears to be a metaphoric representation of the way in which industrialization destroyed the beauty and color of the world by bringing stress and anxiety to the world. The actual source of Giuliana’s anxiety seems to be the perpetual melancholy from childhood days rather than a traumatic car accident in a later part of her life. She seems to be born with some genes of melancholy.

Antonioni’s experiments with color is an important aspect of Red Desert. Each frame of this film appears to be a painting. Antonioni’s choice of color for every scene is majestic. He portrays the dark and black world of an anxious brain and colorful world of a healthy brain. Since the whole story is narrated from the perspective of the protagonist Giuliana, most of the scenes are in dark and grey. We rarely come across color and greenery. We encounter some patches of color only when Giuliana experiences some moments of joy. She is constantly in a melacholic and hypervigilant mode. Sometimes panic attack leads her to strange behavior. At one point of the film, she drives her car almost into the sea in panic.

It seems that Giuliana becomes more settled towards the end of the film. She could not find help from anyone around. All those who were around her, could not give her the kind of support she wanted, not even Corrado. Finally, she turns to herself and finds support from within. There can be a point in life where anxiety level falls to a level where we can see how to deal with anxiety. She replies to her son’s question concerning the yellow smoke from the factories that such smoke is poisonous in nature and even the birds know that they should not fly over it. It seems that Giuliana decides to stay away from toxic people and polluted things around her in order to be mentally stable.

According to Heidegger and Kierkegaard, anxiety is a fundamental mood of human being. The fundamental groundlessness of existence leads us to anxiety. The common people can find some ground of meaning anywhere in the world. There are some people who look for a better and lasting ground of meaning in life and they seem to be anxious all the time. According to Heidegger, authentic dasein is anxious. Anxiety is a mood of human being which makes us less at home in this world. Indeed, Red Desert is an interesting philosophical take on the issue of anxiety in the modern industrialized world.

by Joseph Kala