Michelangelo Antonioni was a director who always placed the visualization and tone of his films above the narrative and plot. His only American film was, “Zabriskie Point”, which surprisingly was his most glaring example of the lack of a coherent narrative structure in his movies.
Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider”, with its great financial success opened the door to the potential of movies that spoke to the counterculture youth movement that came out of the 60s. Antonioni sold his film to the American producers as a something that would appeal to this new group of movie goers. I believe his real intent when making the movie was something completely different
The plot is so nonsensical that to take it at its basic form is a pointless exercise that detracts from the ability to truly appreciate the true beauty of the movie. There are two main characters, being Mark, who as the movie begins claims a need to sacrifice himself for a cause, purchases a handgun and then witnesses a police confrontation with striking black students that results in the killing of one of the students and of a policeman. It is not clear if it is Mark who shot the policeman, but similar to Antonioni’s, “Blow Up”, with that movie’s supposed photographed murder, the fact of who killed him is unimportant. From there he steals an airplane and almost lands on top of the car driven by the second main character.
This is Daria, a young secretory, who is having an affair with her boss and is driving to phoenix in order to meet him at a business conference. Mark then lands his plane on a deserted road, so he can meet up with Daria. The fact that he could actually fly an airplane is dubious at best, but reality is not the point of the movie.
The visualization of commercial America through the eyes of a surrealistic artistic eye is what makes this movie unlike any movie I have ever seen. There are elements of commercialism locked into the ridiculous plot such as violence, sex, and crime, while throughout almost every moment I was bombarded by American commercialism via a non-stop display of advertisements. The movie is a sort of road movie through Americana that is controlled by Maddison Avenue. All the billboards, signs and even radio commercials add to the distant feel of the movies fantasy-like perspective on life. To me the movie plays out like a dream or a hallucinatory acid trip.
Antonioni cast two non-actor nobodies as Mark and Daria, and to no one’s surprise their performances are lacking to say the least. It is however, these two wooden performances that actually add to the unreality and dreamlike feel of the movie. Even Rod Taylor gives an aloof performance in the thankless role of Daria’s sordid businessman boss. It is as if the entire movie lives within someone’s inner mind or dream.
The couple end up in the middle of Death Valley National Park in California on a spot called Zabriskie Point, which boasts an almost alien landscape with its moon-like erosional rocks, sand and sediments. Here the couple have sex in one of the two great set pieces of the movie. They use the sand and dirt with their bodies as if becoming one with the land, and as this is happening there appears out of nowhere several naked couples and threesomes partaking in each other’s bodies. It is an orgy in sand that contains the look of an expressive piece of sensual art. The appearance of all the other people who miraculously appear out of nowhere, made me wonder if I was watching the sensations of the drugged-out minds of Mark and Daria. If you, like me, take the entire movie to be a sort of dream, then these fantasies are fantasies within something that is already a dream. The psychological depth found in the movie is then expanded upon and enforced at the films end in a display of subconscious anger and inner withheld violence. This ending is done in a spectacular repetitive fashion and is a clear visual interpretation of a thought. I was very much impressed by the ending and thought it perfect for the movie.
Yes, it is true, that “Zabriskie Point”, has a ridiculous plot, bad acting and no invested characters. It is also a visual wonder of a movie that has a theme that is located somewhere in the subconscious.
1001 Movies before you die 