Notes on “Red Desert”

This isn’t a film to “follow” so much as one to inhabit. Don’t watch it expecting clear psychological explanations or narrative momentum. Instead, pay attention to color, sound, industrial landscapes, and the way time seems to stretch or stall. The experience becomes rewarding when you treat the film less as a story to decode and more as a sensory and emotional environment. Let ambiguity sit without trying to resolve it, notice how perception replaces action, and ask how the film makes you feel rather than what it is “about.” Seen this way, the film opens up as an exploration of mood, alienation, and modern space, one that invites engagement through attention rather than interpretation.

I’m writing this before I myself have watched the film. When I’m confronted with a movie that has sharply polarized critical responses, I usually try to arm myself with some context in advance—I know I may be in for a viewing experience that could feel unrewarding, or at least demanding in a way that isn’t immediately pleasurable. Since this film is on the list as one I’m suggesting, I also feel some responsibility to offer you the same context, in the hope that it might make the experience of watching it more fulfilling, or at least more intelligible.

So first, let’s get Pauline Kael’s take out of the way.

Kael’s 1966 review is a useful counterweight to the near-reverence Red Desert has accumulated over time. Writing shortly after the film’s release, she found it punishingly slow and questioned whether its ambiguity reflected depth or simply vagueness. While she acknowledges Antonioni’s striking use of color and composition, she argues that visual beauty alone doesn’t clarify what the film is saying—or even whether it knows.

Against that skepticism sits a very different way of understanding the film, one later associated with what came to be called time-image cinema.

From this perspective, Red Desert isn’t meant to communicate through narrative clarity or psychological explanation. Action stalls, cause and effect loosen, and characters become observers rather than agents. Meaning—if that’s even the right word—emerges through duration, color, sound, and what can feel like empty or “dead” time. Ambiguity isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the condition the film asks us to inhabit.

Holding these two views together may be the most productive way to watch. Kael pushes us to ask whether difficulty and slowness actually earn their keep. The time-image perspective suggests that the film is operating in a different register altogether, one where perception matters more than explanation.

That tension—between skepticism and surrender—is really what we’ll be talking about.

The idea of the “time-image”

The term comes from Gilles Deleuze, who used it to describe films in which time is no longer organized around action and resolution. In these films, characters often wander rather than act, and images and sounds no longer push the story forward so much as ask us to sit with them. You don’t need this framework to watch Red Desert, but it can help explain why waiting, drifting, and perception feel more important here than plot.