The cruel and destructive people in Antonioni's The Red Desert

Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) is worth watching for the cinematography and design alone - so many great shorts of weirdly colored interiors, of the horrifying nightmare landscape of a vast gas-fired power complex, of the ruination of the earth around the complex through toxic pollution of water and air (this was set far before there were any serious attempts at environmental regulation - progress and industry at all cost), beautiful shots of vast commercial freighters passing through fog-shrouded harbors, and of course about a million close-ups of Monica Vitti playing a severely disturbed young woman who's at the center of this movie. It's Antonioni, however, so the pace is deliberative and he dispenses w/ the usual continuity and transitions; many of the sequences make no sense if taken literally (e.g., Vitti in one of the first scenes is with her young son at the scene of a workers' strike at the power plant; she wanders off into the woods and reeds to eat a sandwich - where did her son go?). Essentially, it's a story of distress and despair - Vitti has been suicidal since a strange auto accident, and none of the people in her life seem able, or even willing, to communicate w/ her about her anxiety and disturbances. In fact, the people around her are horrible: trying to take advantage of her emotional fragility, casually destructive and violent with one another, and equally destructive with their environment, social, political, and physical: many great scenes of air and water pollution, and the casual indifference of the managers of the power plant to safety and health, from small things like tossing away a sandwich wrapper to the vast, like the yellow poison gas spewing from the huge smokestacks. Great scenes include the drinking scene with 4 couples in a little shack on a commercial wharf that they begin tearing apart incinerating, Richard Harris's crude sexual attack on Vitti, the "tour" of the power plant, the visit to the installation of the telescopes, and ships passing by the wharf in the fog as Vitti wrecklessly drives along the wharf.