Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point, from 1970, was Michelangelo Antonioni's second English-language film and first set in America, and it bears the distinct imprint of an outsider commenting on the tumult of the counterculture movements in the U.S. during the sixties. That is to say, he gets it wrong.

The film opens with college radicals arguing about the best way to enact social change at their university in planning a student strike. The black students mistrust the white students, and there's a nice moment when a young man asks a woman to make coffee (even college radicals were slow to accept the women's movement). One fellow stands up and announces he's ready to die, but not of boredom, and he stalks out.

This guy is Mark, and he ends up a fugitive following a shooting of a cop at a protest. He steals a private plane and meets a young hippie chick, Daria, who is a fill-in secretary for a land development company. In a first and probably last in cinema history, they meet "cute" when Mark buzzes her car in his plane.

They spend an idyllic afternoon at the title location, a desolate spot in Death Valley. In one of the most uncomfortable looking sex scenes I've ever seen, they roll around naked in the desert sand while the music of Jerry Garcia plays. Actors from Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater appear as embodiments of their lust, and an orgy of desert fucking springs forth. I imagine the actors were digging sand out of unmentionable places for a long time after that.

Mark ends up returning the plane and comes to an unfortunate end, while Daria arrives at her boss's desert home, and imagines it being blow to smithereens. Antonioni channels his inner Michael Bay, showing the house exploding about a dozen times. He must have used ten cameras to film it. In slow motion, we see the detritus of a consumer society, like Wonder Bread and patio furniture, heading skyward. Finis.

The film was a spectacular flop, and proved that not just throwing anything up on screen regarding hippies worked (Easy Rider was a huge hit, in contrast). I think this because Easy Rider was more readily about something--the death of an ideal, and the characters bore a closer resemblance to reality. Zabriskie Point is so detached from reality, and an example of the Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome--there's nothing there.

Another problem is the two leads. They are Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and they were non-actors, and it shows. They are stiff and unemotional. In fact, the whole thing looks like a student film, though there are some spectacular views of Death Valley, but I think anyone with a camera could accomplish that.