A Trek to "Zabriskie Point"

Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point," was a notorious flop and critically reviled when it was released in 1970. It has since been rediscovered and reevaluated, and is now hailed by some as a great motion picture, while still dismissed by others. Where do I stand on the film? Well, to start with, I've never been particularly warm toward Antonioni. I've seen all his major films, and find him to be a bore. I learned to stop looking for satisfying plots and character developments, but to focus on environment, on emotional states, and on atmosphere. This got easier as I moved from his earlier films to the later ones as the scope of his films got bigger and their criticisms of modern life and culture more pointed.

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin play a pair of restless young American students. Mark is persecuted by the police, and steals a small airplane on a whim. Daria works as a part-time secretary, and is supposed to be driving to meet her boss at a new real estate development. They intersect in the California desert at Zabriskie Point, fall in love, and travel together for a short time before diverging again. Because this is an Antonioni film, the characters are not as important as their environments. Mark is from Los Angeles, which is portrayed as being full of racial strife and violence. It is smothered in advertisements, which Antonioni pieces together into a collage of cacophonous inanity. The desert, the source of many of the film's most striking images, often dwarfs the actors. For the famous scene where Mark and Daria make love in the dunes, Antonioni brought in members of the experimental acting troupe, The Open Theater, to simulate other lascivious couples appearing alongside them in the dust, until the camera pulls back to show the landscape dotted with intertwined forms. My favorite sequence was the finale where Daria fantasizes about the real estate development being blown to smithereens, the fancy houses and all the modern appliances being obliterated in turn.

A major criticism of the film is how obvious and clumsy it is, how it panders to the counter-culture, but is so simplistic in its ideas. "Zabriskie Point" was the first and only Antonioni film to have been made in the United States, and was assumed by some at the time to be a hostile critique of American lifestyles and attitudes by a pretentious European outsider. It didn't help that "Zabriskie Point" is one of the more immediately comprehensible Antonioni films, and could easily be read as a blunt fable about American radicalism and rebellion. Monica Vitti wandering around in "Red Desert" was abstract enough to be interpreted in all kinds of different ways, but it was a little hard to miss the police brutality, race relations, and psychedelic imagery of "Zabriskie Point." My guess is that Antonioni didn't mean to be nearly as literal or political as his critics thought he was being, and was simply using what he saw to be distinctly American elements to construct a different kind of environment from those in his previous films. Unfortunately this didn't work, possibly because he was using non-actors as his leads who displayed no signs of psychological depth whatsoever, or possibly because he just didn't have as good a grasp of American culture as he thought he did.

Whatever you feel about what Antonioni was trying to say or how he said it, there is no denying that the technique is impeccable. The cinematography by Alfio Contini is gorgeous, from the first shots of students' faces at a contentious meeting to the final, golden sunset. The soundtrack is full of familiar names including Roy Orbison, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, The Youngbloods, and the finale is set to a Pink Floyd track. There are individual sequences here are that come off beautifully, especially the ones set in the endless expanse of the open desert. The more you view "Zabriskie Point" as a pure art film, the better it comes off, and I think having some distance from the 1970s has certainly helped. I also liked its sense of humor, which doesn't get talked about very often. Mark gives his name as "Karl Marx" in jail, which is typed out as "Carl Marx" by the officer on duty. Later, he and Daria paint genitalia and slogans on the stolen plane in wild colors.

I would not call "Zabriskie Point" some kind of misunderstood masterpiece, but it certainly has plenty of cinematic value. Antonioni was in over his head, but that doesn't mean that he failed in his efforts entirely. I found myself transfixed by the shots of exploding bookshelves and television sets, the debris raining down in hypnotic slow motion. Was it shallow and obvious? Oh yes. Could I have sat there watching it all day? Oh yes. While certainly not the best film Anotnioni ever made, I suspect that "Zabriskie Point" may be the most inadvertently entertaining.
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