Blogical Conclusion

A WORLD OF HER OWN

DEC 19, 2009 – EVERYONE KNOWS SOMETHING ISN’T QUITE RIGHT with Giuliana (Monica Vitti), but no one knows exactly what. Her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), for instance, is aware of the situation that removed his wife from reality, reducing her to an industrial-wasteland Blanche Dubois, the only one sensitive to manmade horrors that have ravaged a once-beautiful earth. Ugo explains to Corrado (Richard Harris), “It was raining. The road was wet. She tried to stop. She hasn’t been driving long and she’s so absentminded when she drives. Luckily, the truck stopped short.” Corrado enquires if she was hurt. Ugo replies, “No, not really. Some contusion, but mostly a shock. A terrible shock. After a month in the hospital, she still isn’t quite well. Now she wants to open a shop, no idea what for, in via Alighieri.”

As a result of her condition, Giuliana is, simultaneously, amongst people and all alone – even in a cabin by the sea, surrounded by merrymaking friends and acquaintances. After joining a boisterous effort to strip the cabin walls of wood, in order to feed a fire, Giuliana strays to the window and stares at a ship outside. Corrado ambles towards her. She muses, “It’s never still, never, never, never. I can’t look at the sea for long and not lose interest in what happened on land.” Meanwhile, Ugo observes a man climbing up a stepladder, onto the ship’s deck. He points out that it’s a doctor. Linda (Xenia Valderi) pries her eyes out of the book in her hand and says, “He’s coming for the one who screamed.” Someone else wants to know, “What scream?” Linda replies, “I don’t know, someone was screaming before.” Yet another member of the group demands, “What scream? The ship wasn’t here yet!”

Ugo tells Linda, “It arrived when you were taking care of the fireplace.” She insists, “You’re crazy, it was here already!” When Corrado is asked if he heard anything, he shrugs that he doesn’t know. Giuliana has been silent throughout, perhaps stunned that someone else has tuned into the voices inside her head. The group attempts to explain away Linda’s claim of hearing a scream, suggesting that she perhaps read it in her book. And, finally, Linda succumbs. She isn’t so sure anymore. But Giuliana pipes up, “I heard it.” Ugo is tired of this nonsense. He pleads with his wife to forget about it and that it doesn’t matter. She, however, is adamant. “It matters! Someone yelled. Linda didn’t invent it.” And when Ugo sighs and concedes that she’s right, Giuliana is infuriated by his condescension. She rages, “Don’t say ‘yes’ as if I were…” She stops. A member of the group reasons with her, “Giuliana, who could have screamed? There’s only the sea!”

That’s perhaps why, much later, when her bedridden son asks for a story, Giuliana narrates one whose setting is “only the sea,” featuring a sailing vessel, and at the centre of it all, like Giuliana herself, a solitary girl who hears a strange sound. “Once there was a girl on an island. She was bored with grownups who scared her. She didn’t like boys, all pretending to be grownups. So, she was always alone, among the cormorants, the seagulls and wild rabbits. She had found a little isolated beach where the sea was transparent and the sand pink. She loved that spot. Nature’s colors were so lovely, and there was no sound. She left when the sun went down. One morning a boat appeared. Not one of the usual boats, a real sailing ship, one of those that braved the seas and the storms of this world. And, who knows, of other worlds.”

The girl in the story swims out to the ship. “From afar, it looked splendid. As it approached, it became mysterious. She saw no one aboard. It stopped a while, then veered and sailed away silently, just as it had come. She was used to people’s strange ways and was not surprised. But, no sooner back on shore… there!” The girl hears a siren song and looks around puzzled. “Who was singing? The beach was deserted. But the voice was there. Now near. Now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that she had never realised, looked like flesh. And the voice at that point was so sweet.” Like the skeptical grownups earlier at the cabin who ganged up against Giuliana, her son asks who was singing. And to this wide-eyed, trusting child, she can finally reveal what, then, she couldn’t (or wouldn’t). “Everybody. Everything.”

Il Deserto Rosso (1964, Italian; aka Red Desert). Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti.

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