Recommended Viewing: "Red Desert"--director Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece about modern alienation and the effects of an industrial landscape

"Red Desert", out this week on the Criterion Collection (a collection ranging over 500 titles on DVD), is Antonioni's first color film. It carefully delineates the neurosis of a middle-class woman, Giulana (portrayed by Antonioni's muse Monica Vitti), whose husband works in the nearby power plant. The setting is an obvious pretext for the contemporary desolation and angst associated with the progressive age, and the industrial setting, replete with a multicolored panorama, is one of bleak apprehensiveness. Intense reds, blues, and yellows form part of the provocative cinematographic setting, while Vitti's intense red hair flurries about her twitching face in reflection of her inner frenzy. Antonioni is able to capture the alienation inherent in one's soul by a simple pan of the camera, focusing on an electrical tower or an abandoned fishing cottage, or by an extreme close-up of a nervous Monica Vitti. This film could be deemed pessimistic, yet it sums up life in the postmodern world, and the effects it has overall on the individual. With Richard Harris. Buy at http://www.amazon.com/