(1964; Il deserto rosso, Italian) Recipient of multiple international awards and regarded by many critics as director (co-screenwriter with Tonino Guerra) Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece of alienation in the modern world, the pictorially and narratively abstract film portrays the inner wasteland of a desperate woman's frenzied feelings of isolation.

Wife of the manager of a power plant and mother of their little boy, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), hungry for something to fill an inner void, has recently been in an automobile accident from which she was only bruised but hospitalized for shock, in need of a readjustment to reality. "You can't imagine the things I'm afraid of," she confesses to Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), who has just arrived in Ravenna from Milan to see her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), looking for workers for a project in Brazil.

Fog and cold, a strike in progress at the factory, drab grays and browns with muted reds, the local waters polluted from factory waste, piles of smoky detritus surround the industrial landscape. Ugo (who confides to Zeller that Giuliana's "gears" haven't meshed since the incident) was away in London at the time of the accident; she feels he's still distant and indifferent toward her.

Lacking any sense of her own identity, feeling she's dependent on others without anyone's needing her (not even little Valerio), she has panic attacks and fears she's drowning. She inquires of Zeller if he's a rightist or leftist, to which he answers apolitically that he has a calm conscience, believing in humanity, a little less in justice, and in progress.

With Zeller, Giuliana and Ugo join their friends Max (who takes advantage of bankrupt factories and women) and his wife Linda along with Mili in a waterfront shack where they cram into a small room with a mattress and red-painted wood walls; after Orlando (to whom Max has sold this property) and his girlfriend drop by and discuss aphrodisiacs (such as quail eggs and a cream made from alligator fat), Giuliana tells Ugo she wants to make love, but he says there's nowhere for them to go.

When Giuliana tells Zeller her eyes are wet and asks, "What should I watch?," he replies: "You wonder what to look at. I wonder how to live." As they begin to tear down the walls of the room to feed the stove fire for warmth, a hulking ship pulls up to dock and raises a yellow quarantine flag. Afraid and confused, Giuliana wants to leave; when the others follow her out of the shack, she drives off alone in the car in the fog, nearly going off the pier.

After Ugo leaves for several days on business, Giuliana reveals her secret to Corrado; she tells Valerio a strange tale of a girl alone on an island who experiences two mysteries in the same day: a sailing ship without a crew and a disembodied woman's voice singing from everywhere. Perhaps Brazil or some other place, she wonders: Is there somewhere where someone can go to get well?

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