Red Desert 1964

In Ravenna, Italy, Giuliana Monica Vitti walks with her young son, Valerio Bartoleschi, toward the petrochemical plant run by her husband, Bruno Scipioni. The scene unfolds among striking workers, towering vats, and debris that cast a disorienting, almost mechanical chorus of images and sounds. Inside the plant, Ugo is talking with a visiting business associate, Corrado Zeller Richard Harris, who hopes to recruit workers for a binary, far-off project in Patagonia, Argentina. The two men chat amid the factory’s clamor, and Giuliana arrives to be introduced; she departs to wait in Ugo’s office, a small distance that feels like a crossing between worlds.

Later, Ugo confides to Corrado that Giuliana has been unwell since a recent automobile accident, though she was physically unharmed. That night, in their apartment, Giuliana is seized by fear as she relives a dream of sinking into quicksand, a nightmare that leaves her unsettled and more isolated. Ugo struggles to offer comfort or sense, sensing something depths-deeply unsettled beneath the surface of their marriage.

Corrado, meanwhile, visits Giuliana at an empty shop she plans to open, and the two begin a tentative closer exchange. He listens as she hints at a restless, searching spirit, and she shares more about her mental strain, including a hospital encounter with a young patient who was told to find someone or something to love. The patient’s fear is described through a stark image: there was “no ground beneath her, like she was sliding down a slope, sinking, always on the verge of drowning.” Their conversation drifts from personal histories to asymmetric lives, and the atmosphere grows colder as they travel to Ferrara for a recruitment drive and then to a quiet radio observatory in Medicina, where the vast, indifferent machinery of science mirrors the emptiness Giuliana feels.

Over the following weekend, the group—Max and Linda alongside Giuliana and Corrado—drifts toward a riverside shack at Porto Corsini. There, the gathering feels almost casual, a smattering of jokes, role-playing, and sexual innuendo that offer temporary solace from inner turmoil. In the fog, a mysterious ship docks just outside the shack, and a doctor boards the vessel, prompting a surge of panic in Giuliana when the ship is suddenly quarantined due to a contagious illness. The moment crystallizes the fragility of perceived realities and the fragility of connection.

With Ugo away on a business trip, Giuliana spends more time with Corrado, and she reveals more about the depths of her anxieties. When Valerio later develops a sudden, inexplicable limp, Giuliana fears polio and searches for an explanation to soothe him. She tells him a story about an island girl who swims toward an isolated cove, where even the rocks seem to awaken and sing. The tale underscores a sense that reality itself is slippery and that perception shapes danger. Yet the boy later reveals the fear was a cruel test; he has been pretending to be paralyzed, a revelation that only amplifies Giuliana’s sense of loneliness and helplessness.

Seeking relief, Giuliana goes to Corrado’s room and, after initial resistance, they share a sexual encounter. The moment fails to fully quiet the ache inside her, and Corrado later drives her to her empty shop, where she murmurs that there is something “terrible” about reality. Seeking human connection, she wanders to a dockside, where a Turkish sailor appears but cannot understand her words. In a moment of quiet resignation, she confides a bleak truth: “We are all separate.”

The daytime after that encounter finds Giuliana walking with her son near the plant as a yellow plume of poisonous smoke curls from a nearby smokestack. Valerio asks whether birds are being killed by the fumes, and Giuliana answers with a practical, caretaker’s warning: the birds have learned to avoid the toxic air. They walk away together, a small, stubborn anchor against the vast, indifferent machinery and the ache of isolation that has become their shared weather.

We are all separate.