It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how Michelangelo Antonioni, director of such proven masterpieces as L’Avventura, Blow-Up and La Notte, could possibly have given us Zabriskie Point (1970). It’s as if Stanley Kubrick had directed Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!
Antonioni said his “basic reason for making a film in America was that I love this country, I love the landscape—that’s why I chose Death Valley, because it’s so beautiful and not because it’s dead. This is also the most interesting country in the world at the moment, because of what’s going on here: the contradictions, many of which exist everywhere, but which are already crashing against each other here. That’s what Î tried to show in ‘Zabriskie Point.’”
Antonioni made the mistake of creating a European film in the U.S.A. It might have worked. About the same time, Clint Eastwood was making westerns in Spain. But it’s the ill-conceived treatment of the subject which dooms the project, exposing—without the blessed, inherent whimsy of Blow-Up—an art film edifice struggling to support a static road picture (which has no idea it’s a road picture). Easy Rider without motorcycles.
The story has to do with what 1960s youth was feeling about America. Disenchantment. Rage. Frustration. [Insert appropriate noun/verb here] Two characters guide us down an oft treaded path: Mark Frechette, a dopey college student who might have shot a police officer, and Daria Halprin, a free-spirited teenager who wonders about the world through the eyes of an eight-year-old. Both Mark and Daria (the characters use the actors’ names) had razor-thin acting experience before Antonioni yelled ‘Action!’. Again, that might have worked, but in a film with minimal dialogue, much depends on an actor’s ability to… act.
The visual metaphors—an orgy in the desert, a rich man’s house exploding—are so clumsy and misplaced, that a grim assumption is that Antonioni is being ironic. But for those who know his work, irony is rarely a strong force.
The one redeeming feature is the soundtrack. Artists include Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, and The Youngbloods.
Zabriskie Point is a morbid curiosity: it’s worth watching to appreciate what happens when a brilliant cinematic talent—a man said to be able to ‘think inside a camera lens’—just can’t focus.
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