Veni, Vitti, Yeah Whatever

Veni, Vitti, Yeah Whatever

by Steve Dollar

Watching Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 landmark-in-cinema Red Desert, gorgeously updated to Blu-ray format in a new Criterion Collection release, I was struck not only by Monica Vitti's distressed beauty but by a sudden revelation. The Italian director, who was 95 years old when he died in 2007, was often labeled a poet of modernist alienation. Yet, it wasn't until I saw the glamorous Vitti, playing a Real Housewife of Industrialized Ravenna, transfixed by some nameless emotional funk as she idled against the clean lines and austere decor of the maestro's chosen interiors, that I realized Antonioni's influence extended to snarky design blogs.

Damned if one of the great European auteurs of the last century wasn't also the grandfather of Unhappy Hipsters, the website that slaps sarcastic comments on repurposed photos from the pages of Dwell magazine. Sample image: A little girl with a pony tail, face away from the camera, isolated in a room full of sleek, minimalist chairs and a Saarinen dining table. And this: "It was punishment unique to her modernist parents: hours of solitary confinement with classic and contemporary design icons, followed by stern yet uncomfortably hypocritical lectures on freedom of expression and rejecting tradition."

I don't bring up this comparison to provoke a cheap laugh, although, please, go ahead. The point is that a half-century after Antonioni made his signature, pathbreaking films?which also include the trilogy L'Eclisse (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'Avventura (1962)?his visual style and thematic concepts have been so thoroughly absorbed into popular culture, into our ways of looking and mass media's ways of making us look, that no one even notices anymore.

Which is why BAMcinematek's 10-day revival of the film, which begins today, is such a cool, crucial event?not only for so-called cultural vegetarians, but for anyone who still possesses all their five senses and cares anything at all for aesthetic pleasures. A new 35mm print struck by distributor Janus Films will be screened, offering a rare occasion to appreciate on celluloid exactly why the director's transition from monochrome to a full palette was so significant. It gives a freshly vivid account of the painterly approach Antonioni took for his first color film, one whose original title was pure abstract expressionist: Pale Blue and Green. That's actually a rather gentle description for the bleak industrial wasteland that serves not so much as the story's backdrop as its foreground: a depopulated landscape of rusted oranges, whorehouse reds, sulfurous yellows, gun-metal grays and anitseptic whites. Across this expanse wanders the psychologically unhinged Giuliana (Italian sex symbol, and Antonioni's lover, Vitti), whose auburn locks whip stylishly amid the toxic gusts of her husband's power plant, which has turned a northeastern Italian coastline into something akin to the Gowanus Canal. But the Gowanus Canal never looked this good.

The ghastly, ghostly terrain, with its grinding machine harmonies and horizon the hue of cold oatmeal, is transformed by Antonioni and his cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma, into a spellbinding vista with its own raw, stark splendor. Here, perhaps, the origins of industrial chic that now gives us coffee table books fat with textured color images of Detroit after the fall. Yet, it also seems to mirror the mental state of Giuliana, whose industrialist husband describes her as a mechanism "whose gears don't mesh." Newly ushered home from a hospital stay?she was found by a factory worker after a suicide attempt, although she made up a story to cover herself?she doesn't see herself as a trophy wife, but an aspiring businesswoman. She gets no play from her man Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), but is instantly drawn to a visitor, Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris, awkwardly dubbed), a business associate of her husband's come to recruit workers for a Patagonian enterprise. They wander together through the banks of fog, trading elliptical banter that doesn't really add up to anything. After Zeller concludes an explication of his beliefs as, ultimately, "a little less in justice, a little more in progress," Giuliana tells him, "That's some bunch of words you've strung together."

If the quest for meaning doesn't get very far, the drift is exquisite. The money shot comes halfway through, as Zeller and Giuliana find themselves at a mildly kinky cocktail party in a creaky shack by a loading dock, with a roomful of swingers eager to fondle them. Pretending (perhaps) to ingest an aphrodisiac, Giuliana teases the whole bunch of them before everyone suddenly exits amid quarantine warnings. After a brief incident involving her forgotten purse, Giuliana discovers herself removed from the others, facing them from a distance as the fog thickens and the static figures slowly disappear. It?s the kind of scene you watch, rewind to rewatch and rewind again, so perfectly done, so ridiculously "yeah" that it now looks like a total clich�?like the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin or the tumbling bone-into-spaceship mindblower edit in 2001. These things are only ever obvious in retrospect.

What's rewarding about Red Desert is that the obviousness doesn't matter at all. The film and its ideas and images are not dated. They are prescient. You watch it and realize that groovy new-urban sensibility you've so thoughtfully nurtured since graduate school was never yours at all. Antonioni mapped that consciousness before any design blogger learned to crawl. To witness Vitti, lost in a psychic vertigo, stumbling through these masterful frames, is only to look in the mirror.

Posted by ahillis at September 2, 2011 1:25 PM

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/greencine/daily/~3/lvjL-Atq7Wc/008122.html

celebrity hair celebrity movies celebrity babies celebrity relationships celebrity couples