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Zabriskie Point

1970, Movie, R, 112 mins

Zabriskie Point: Review

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In his super-successful BLOW-UP, Antonioni made an attempt to understand the English youth movement of the 1960s. Here, in his first American film, Antonioni took his search for answers to the States. Unfortunately, with this picture the director falls into two traps: employing endless "anti-Establishment" cliches and saddling himself with the underwhelming talents of Mark Frechette. The picture opens in documentary style, with a meeting of college radicals discussing the meaning of revolution. Mark (Frechette), disgusted with the students' stagnant ideals, declares that he is ready to die--but not of boredom--and walks out. Identified as a cop killer during a campus riot, Mark flees to a nearby airfield, steals a small private plane, flies through Death Valley, and meets Daria (Daria Halprin), a pretty, pot-smoking, meditative secretary. It's not long before they are holding hands at Zabriskie Point, a tourist spot marked by a small plaque explaining that a man named Zabriskie discovered mineral matter there. The psychedelic happenings plod along until the explosive, apocalyptic finale. On the basis of Antonioni's "art-house" following in the US, MGM decided to jump on the bandwagon and give the director carte blanche for this film. The result is a critical but relatively accurate portrait of America in the late 1960s, which, however, now seems horribly dated. Antonioni concentrates chiefly on the gaps between student radicals and the establishment, naturalism and plasticity, free-spirited individualism and the restraints of modern life. While Antonioni's visual sense is once again in top form, his "mind-expanding" hippie dialogue, as delivered by his amateur leads, is painful to experience. MGM hoped that a combination of art-house and hippie audiences would help return their $7 million investment. Instead the film was a box-office and critical bomb, surviving today as a nugget of the hippie culture. leave a comment
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