Zabriskie point (1970)

Antonioni is generally a director that I like. One might say that he trades in the europa-chic - that he makes alienation look quite appealing in films such as The Night, The Eclipse and Avventura. Not to mention Blow-Up. Red desert is a very typical film about the world falling apart in hollow human beings and dead surroundings, but it seemed like a less fashion-sensitive film than the others. I expected Zabriskie Point to be a similiarly alienation-chic movie as most of the other Antonioni movies. And it was, but in an even worse way, and in a way that really is a grotesquely familiar image of the disgruntled European director going to the US and A to make a cynical movie. Here we have American kids in the late sixties, enamored with counterculture politics and alternative lifestyles in a country of advertisement, business and repulsive urban architecture. From the get-go, we know that this is Hell. We are thrown into a student organization meeting. The sound is jarring. People are shouting slogans, others are smoking, or looking bored, or doing something else - just a bunch of diverse people ending up in the same 'movement'. It's hard to hear what they say, and it's easy to guess that it doesn't really matter anyways. There is a riot of some sort, and we see a man who seems to shoot a cop, but it isn't really him. He steals an airplane and in the desert he meets a girl with a buick and they fall in love (add quotatin marks) and they hang out in the desert and then the guy paints the airplane in bright colors and the girl goes to her business meeting but she's not interested in that so she leaves the building and then she stands outside, imagining that the building explodes. THE END. Some of my friends interpreted the film as providing an image of back-to-nature-bliss, exodus from civilization, the Nomadic transformatory non-people turning into animals. Well, I can see the sense in that, but for my own part I saw the film as an attempt to depict a deadlock. There is nowhere to go. The city is hell. It's hell up in the air. And the desert is boring (this is sex as immense joyless tedium) and business is hell. Everything is hollow and desolate, shallow and narcissistic. People talk and look like robots. There were things I liked about Zabriskie point, aspects that were not too self-occupied and self-important. Antonioni has always had a brilliant way of treating architecture and design as an important dimension of the characters' life. As one reviewer put it: Antonioni transforms his own time into sci-fi. And that always works. This also goes for Zabriskie point which renders American urban streets, cluttered with ugly buildings and signs, more hellish than I've seen anywhere else. I find Antonioni's message quite sympathetic: the rebel is just the shadow form of the commercial idiot, but that message is drummed into my mind in a too cynical way, leaving me with no greater understanding of anything, just a vague feeling: this whole lot sucks, it really does. - - - Ending verdict: good visuals, depressing story - good use of sounds & music at times.