Vitti is superb, giving her best performance in the four Antonioni films I’ve seen with her. She has played the sex goddess, the dalliance, the mystery woman, but here she plays a frail, confused woman who utters such vapidities as, "I’d like all the people who ever loved me here, around me, like a wall" — the neurotic counterpart to the deranged and psychotic young woman Catherine Deneuve would essay in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion that same year, save for murder, of course, rather than the sensual antipodes of the strong Bergmanesque ice goddesses against whom she is so often contrasted.

Yet, whereas Repulsion has dated somewhat, not due to the script nor acting, but being a black and white film set in Mod-era Britain (like Antonioni’s later color film Blowup), The Red Desert has not. Its situations, its effects and design, and its character relations, are all timeless. In fact, the ecological concerns of the film are perfectly in tune with the current greener aesthetic that the global warming world must deal with, as the industrial wasteland shown was standard in the 1960s. I saw it in real life, growing up in New York City, and it was a concern for films as serious as this, or as off the cuff as Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster.

The film is picaresque, in some ways, as many of the scenes, at first blush, seem like mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, but, again, they do eventually cohere, and give a viewer some sense of why Giuliana has such difficulty in reacting naturally to life’s lessons.

It takes, as example, the whole of the film for Giuliana to even get a grip on what plagues her, and this is alone at night, talking to a sailor on a pier who does not speak Italian. She cannot connect with Corrado, Ugo, nor even Valerio. Before that time the only other moment she seems at ease, if briefly, is at a weekend outing with friends, including Corrado. They go to a fishing shack on a pier, one with a red room and a bed, and an orgy seems ready to break out, until it does not. Instead, the moment ends with a doctor rushing aboard a ship outside, and ready to quarantine the area, as it is drenched in fog. Giuliana is so distressed she nearly drives her car off the end of the pier.

Yet Giuliana carries an idyll of serenity within her, one we know from a little tale she tells her son, as he is faking a polio ‘incident.’ It’s a first rate fable, and all the more remarkable since almost no critics, at the film’s release nor later, saw it for what it is: Giuliana’s vision of herself in a world she could manage.

It is set on a remote island (filmed in Sardinia) where the sea is light blue and the sand is pink. A young preteen girl in a bikini (Emanuela Paola Carboni) swims and cavorts without anyone around. She lounges about, tanned with a white bikini line on her back. Giuliana describes the place as soundless, but there are waves and animals that make noise, so what she really means is there is no man-made sound. She is joyous until one day a ghost ship arrives in the bay. She swims out to it, but seeing it is deserted, she is afraid and swims back to shore. Giuliana describes the ship as possibly being otherworldly. Then she hears a high-pitched woman’s voice singing (a refrain that also went over the opening credits and harkens back to a similar disembodied voice from the earlier Russian science fiction film Planeta Burg) and does not understand it, nor where it comes from — the sea, the rocks, etc. Valerio asks his mother where the singing was coming from and Giuliana replies it came from everybody and everything.