1964 was a time when society struggled, as it does today, to hoist the banner of human decency above the morally emaciated political structure; held hostage by parasitic ideologues and imperial warmongers. Four years away from the backlash in Paris, four years away from breaking point, it was, in many ways, similar to the prevailing mood of today: tyranny had the upper hand and people, to a certain degree, felt powerless to stop it. Monica Vitti plays Giuliana; a fragile and sensitive young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; married to an absent industrialist and raising their child in the coastal east Italian town of Ravenna. Giuliana's escapist daydreams; told as stories to her son, tend to go on a little longer than necessary. And though they work to convey subjective time and her late-in-the-day longing for another life; a harsher juxtaposition with the industrial power plant would've alluded to Giuliana's internal struggle to reconcile reality with dreams, despair with hope and malaise with optimism. Canted shots of Giuliana walking through the industrial estate or of people's faces obscured by toxic smoke & fog, indicate that director Michelangelo Antonioni is using industrialism to represent an intrusive occupation of sorts; the physical manifestation of Giuliana's anxiety & alienation. Monica Vitti is truly remarkable in this picture: both powerful and vulnerable in the way that she initially recoils from the accepted promiscuity of the time, reluctantly participating but finding greater comfort & solace in choosing the colour scheme for an as yet non-existent shop. Her performance, though occasionally melodramatic, is an example of how good she really was and why 'The Red Desert' earns its place alongside what's usually perceived to be Antonioni's 'Incommunicability Trilogy' (i.e. 'L'Avventura', 'La Notte' and 'L'Eclisse'). 'Il Deserto Rosso' is different only because its in colour, other than that, I rate it as being an equal to those films with Monica Vitti's best onscreen performance, tied alongside 'L'Eclisse'. An underrated masterpiece.