Product Description
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Zabriskie Point
Mark is a student radical. Daria is a beautiful, restless young
woman. Their meeting sparks a deep passion in this visually
stunning fantasia on the 60s counterculture when e brings Mark
and Daria together in Death Valley's desolate yet stunning
Zabriskie Point. Daria is driving to a meeting with her employer.
Mark has been forced to steal an airplane to escape from Los
Angeles. The two become entranced both by each other and by the
fleeting beauty of the shifting desert sands, but their time
together is shattered a tragedy that will haunt Daria forever.
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As a postcard from a bygone era, Michelangelo Antonioni's sole
American movie is amazing to look at. This was the Italian
director's first film since his English-language breakthrough
Blowup (1966), which had been a masterpiece that captivated
general and art-house audiences alike. Expectations
understandably ran high, and as a visual experience Zabriskie
Point delivered. Here was this foreigner's eye, among the most
distinctive in world cinema, looking at city and desert, streets
and backroads, office towers, mini-marts, cars, airfields,
and nonstop signage--the textures of U.S. life transliterated
into something alien and askew. Revisited decades later, that's
the aspect of Zabriskie Point that comes fascinatingly to the
fore.
>Not so in 1970. Zabriskie Point bombed with critics and
audiences because Antonioni proved to be way out of his depth in
attempting to relate to American youth and their inchoate
revolution--something underscored by the irredeemably amateurish
performances of unknowns Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette in the
leading roles. The story, such as it is, takes its impetus from a
student strike during which a officer is . Whether
Mark fired the is unclear (the editing at the crucial moment
recalls the cop-killing in Godard's Breathless), but he splits.
His flight into the desert in a stolen plane will bring him
together with Daria, who's driving to Phoenix to meet her
employer and possible lover, a real-estate developer (Rod
Taylor). What transpires between these two young people has to be
seen to be believed, except that it can't be believed.
Nevertheless, the events of the next-to-last reel license
Antonioni to tee up an extraordinary finale--a hallucinatory
apocalypse in which American materialism gets what's coming to
it, and the desert becomes a sunset bloom.
It's a measure of the film's miscalculation that, although the
Taylor character is clearly meant to personify capitalist
rapacity, the actor's professionalism is such a from the
vapid leads that the guy comes off as sympathetic. There are also
brief, welcome turns by G.D. Spradlin (future deliverer of the
Apocalypse Now line "Terminate with extreme prejudice") and
veteran Western player Paul Fix, whose Death Valley café becomes
the scene of an astonishing Edward Hopper moment. Gold is where
you find it. --Richard T. Jameson
Also on the DVD
The lone extra is the original trailer, with which, like the
title song, we can only hope Antonioni had nothing to do. Over
images of the prehistoric wilderness that gives the film its
name, an adult voice salaciously intones: "Zabriskie Point ...
where a boy ... and a girl ... meet ... and touch ... and blow
their minds." Cue rock music and mass love-in. --Richard T.
Jameson