The political arguments of the decade were not Antonioni’s primary interest: his concerns were metaphysical and philosophical. He seems to have believed that, in step with technology, morality, too, needed to evolve. Our inability to adapt to the new industrial rhythms of life had resulted, he maintained, in a dangerous imbalance in our psychological and spiritual nature. “Science has never been more humble and less dogmatic,” he said in an interview before filming began, “whereas our moral attitudes are governed by [an] absolute sense of stultification.”[…]
Married to a man who provides for her in all the conventional ways but not in the ones that matter, Giuliana encounters in his colleague Corrado (Richard Harris), perhaps for the first time in her life, a person who takes the trouble to look at her properly—as a fellow human being and an equal. “Properly” here includes sexually, of course, but not just, or not even predominantly, sexually. “Courteously” might be the better way to put it—that is, with a secret and reticent understanding.
[…]
Artists of ideas like Antonioni—unrepentantly highbrow and serious—engage in a permanent gamble with the public: will they be judged pretentious for their pains? In Red Desert, it seems to me, all the cylinders are firing. One cannot miss its passion—or its pessimism. The movie is a beautiful, haunting, and complex meditation on the spiritual cost of modernity.
— Mark Le Fanu (Criterion)
Antonioni's film was lodged in my memory as an environmental dirge: billows of steam and smoke, ravaged landscapes, people dwarfed by machinery, a woman going mad amid the destruction. But a recent viewing brought back its essential ambiguousness. No green jeremiad this: it's a movie that's fascinated—even thrilled—by the new forms of modern industrial life, even as it ackknowledges the pscyhic and physical devastation modernity exacts.[…]
Foregrounding modern man's angst and peddling unremitting seriousness, Red Desert can seem passé. (And slow—what some see as painterly, others liken to watching paint dry.) It's the curse of the influential: what was once groundbreaking will have lost its luster once its innovations have been internalized by what follows. Todd Haynes's Safe, about the breakdown of a California housewife, is a direct descendant and a better film—but there's no denying that it would never have existed without Antonioni's pioneering effort.
— Elbert Ventura (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.