This first image I’m proposing cruelly occurred to me while watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s first colour film, Red Desert, and in a perhaps selfish act I’m sharing it with you in order to loosen its hold on me. What I’m picturing is Monica Vitti’s face — that phenomenal, cat-like face. Phenomenal not merely because of her striking beauty, but because Vitti’s face possesses contraries. She is somehow sharp yet pillowy at the same time. Padded, yet tapered: lips pouting or opened just so, but always propped on the round kindness of her crescent chin.

But that’s not entirely what I’m imagining — not her face alone, though that’s certainly part of it. Since seeing Red Desert again, I’m imagining Monica Vitti peeling off her own face. Starting at her hairline and then, as if gently rolling open a delicate scroll, peeling off her freckled skin, carefully removing it from over her eye slits and down the cushioned curve of her cheeks, warily over the tight point of her nose, and then around her lips; unfastening her face from the organization of its structure.

I’ll stop there, at Vitti’s jawline, because what struck me while watching Red Desert was Vitti’s mask. The movement of her eyes, darting, still or startled, fretful and spooked, panic-stricken, distrustful. Her eyes, as if seen from behind a mask. Perhaps this has something to do with the contradiction I mentioned: how her face stings but assuages.