Michelangelo Antonioni is often referred to as a director whose work is not for all tastes. Well, what artist is? What the utterer of such sentiments usually means is that they do not ‘like’ his films, because they are not filled with insipid action, worse dialogue, lack of character development, etc.

In fact, some critics of Antonioni even claim that his characters are all warped and one-dimensional loners, potential Lee Harvey Oswald types bathed in depression and anomie. What this evidences is that the critic has not really watched the film, or confuses a character that is confused with a confused portrayal of the character. Callow critics often mistake the thing itself for how it is presented. A good example of this tendency is Antonioni’s 1964 film The Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso), his first film shot in color.

The film is lauded as a great example of the use of color, or an expressionistic or impressionistic work of art (apparently critics cannot decide, again proving they do not even know what the terms mean), but then dismissed as slow, dull, or that old stand-by, ‘It’s like watching paint dry.’ Well, only if you’re an idiot, or think that the lowest common denominator crap of a Steven Spielberg is somehow an example of ‘genius.’

As with Stanley Kubrick’s later magisterial 2001: A Space Odyssey, this film does not lack a narrative, nor is the narrative poor. It is simply a different form of narrative, and an outstanding example of such.

Yet, even The Red Desert’s boosters often make the error of stating that Antonioni is ‘more interested in shapes and spaces than character.’ Not so, for how those characters enter certain spaces, what those spaces are, and how they act and react within those spaces is essential to the story, which is the depiction of how human beings react to the permanence of loneliness in the stasis of change. Although often lumped together with Antonioni’s L’Alienation Trilogy (L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse), this hour and fifty-three minute long film transcends those three because, by film’s end, the protagonist has learned how to survive, and will. The heroes of the earlier films all flounder, founder, or despair at their plights.

It is, in fact, a remarkable script, penned by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, who also created great films with Federico Fellini and Theo Angelopoulos, thus positioning himself as one of the greatest screenwriters in cinema history (alongside Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen). And whereas the use of color is often lauded as ‘beautiful,’ there is very little said as to why it’s beautiful, and that’s not because of the colors themselves, but how they contrast with the desaturated world the characters inhabit — such as a fruit stand that appears early on in the film, yet all the fruit appear grayish, as if covered with a mold. The reason for this is that the world is being portrayed subjectively, but from an objective perspective. This is so the audience can sense some of what Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is sensing without having to couch all of that in predictable point of view shots from her perspective. It is a technique that accomplishes what it attempts, but so successfully that few viewers and critics seem to even realize this fact.