Michelangelo Antonioni - Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)

An auto accident gives Giuliana a shock that, aggravated by the peculiar environment in which the profession of her husband, an electronics engineer, obliges her to live, turns into a state of depressive neurosis. Corrado, a friend of her husband’s, is attracted to the woman and tries to help her to emerge from her nightmare-ridden solitude, embarking on a fleeting and unsatisfying affair with her. The experience only deepens the state of depression of the woman, who is unwittingly deceived by her young son as well when he fakes a serious illness. Having failed in her attempt to put a violent end to her pointless existence, Giuliana will carry on with her life in a precarious balance between resignation and madness.

I tried to squeeze every last drop of narrative force out of the color so that it would be in keeping with the spirit of every scene, of every sequence. The concordance between certain new ways of using color in modern cinema—I’m thinking for example of Resnais, of Bergman—is not accidental. It is a need that we have all felt at the same time because it is linked to expression of the reality of our time [...]. I’ve never thought: “Now I’m going to put a blue next to a brown.” I wanted the grass around the hut on the canal to be colored to accentuate that sense of desolation, of death. It was necessary to convey a certain truth of the landscape.