Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

In the wake of the death of the great and perplexing Italian director, many of his films are getting an airing at art-houses around the country. In the case of the endlessly fascinating The Passenger and deliciously enjoyable Blow Up, this is a great chance to catch up on classics that haven't lost their power. As for Deserto Rosso - well...

I was eager to see this again, as back in the Sixties when I was an aspiring cineaste who didn't know what I was getting into, it was my first ever big screen art-house movie, seen on a grey Sheffield Sunday afternoon at the admirable Abbeydale Film Society. Weaned on the BBC's (of necessity black and white) excellent programme of foreign films as I was, this was also my first ever non-mainstream film in colour - so a first for me as well as Antonioni. I was baffled and rather terrified, but still I managed to keep my end up in the subsequent discussion on the bus back home with my fellow sixth former and voyager into the enticing unknown of European vie de boheme - after all we'd just discovered the word anomie, which came in handy. What was this strange grown-up world of angst and emptiness, and did we really want to be part of it? Oh yes!

So it was with relish and trepidation that I approached the Tyneside Cinema on yet another Sunday afternoon in a northern city for a second viewing 40 years later. But although I've seen a lot, I mean, a lot, it seems I'm still like sweet 17 a lot, and yet again I stumbled out baffled and troubled and frustrated yet transfixed by the look of it.

In an east coast Italian port (Ravenna, but seen from a side very different from that of its ‘vieilles usines de dieu ‘ Byzantine churches beloved of art historians) of polluted mist and monochrome strike-ridden factories, Monica Vitti is the spiritually lost wife of an industrialist. She builds a memorable performance of irrational neuroticism on very slight material, eyes ringed with black, blank faced, only her hair almost fetishitically alive, a woman sleepwalking through her own life.

Not so Richard Harris, who utterly fails to convince, and how he knows it, as a visiting businessman. Awful dubbing doesn't help, nor the perpetual look of unease on his face (‘What am I doing here??), and it's impossible to believe that the beige mac conceals the coiled spring of sexuality (so patent in This Sporting Life only the previous year) that is clearly meant to be lurking within. How can this hellraiser look so bland? If it's casting against type, it just doesn't work. In fact Harris got so pissed off with the length of time the filming was taking that he left before it finished, and some of his distance shots are by a stand-in.

But it's the look of the thing that beguiles. Antonioni's drunk on his newly discovered colour - swirly greys and yellows of a polluted and oppressive world, dense cubist blocks of piercing colour, against which human figures and faces appear blank, soulless, lost, as vast bulks of industrial buildings and ships dwarf them and mist swallows them. A landscape of neurosis made manifest.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema 2 September 2007