Desert dream

>>The Parc offers a rare opportunity to see Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s strangest film

by MATTHEW HAYS

“Who cares about rules,” the late Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni once told an interviewer. “Often I have shot something just to show myself how useless they are.”

The statement was a typical one for Antonioni, a director who always aspired to be counter-cinematic in his aesthetic and narrative choices, forging a new cinematic universe. His films have become emblematic of an era—especially L’Aventura (1959) and Blow-up (1966).

But arguably his strangest film is Zabriskie Point (1970), a cryptic, stunning movie that provoked controversy even as it was being shot, when American “patriots” thought the Italian director was setting out to make an anti-American diatribe. He was, actually, but that’s beside the point.

Antonioni’s raison d’être was all about confounding expectations, and Zabriskie was yet another case in point. With a dream-like ambiguity, he sets up his two characters to meet, cast away from civilization. But he suggests that his film is somehow rooted in realism by having his leads, played by Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, go by the names Mark and Daria. Mark is caught up in a campus protest early on; a gun goes off and a cop goes down, and it’s entirely unclear whether it was the shot from Mark’s gun that felled the authority figure.

Never mind the nuance, Mark is now a suspect on the lam. He steals a small plane (!) and heads off into the desert, where he meets up with Daria, herself a bit lost, given that she works for a real-estate mogul (Rod Taylor, in a perfectly uptight performance) who’s plotting to develop a big chunk of untouched desert.

Whether Antonioni’s critics liked it or not, Zabriskie tapped into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that was downright eerie. Just months later, a campus shooting at Kent State would famously take four innocent lives, when an anti-Vietnam protest was fired upon by the National Guard.

Antonioni’s trademark disdain for materialism—something he felt had left a terrifying void in Western society—is here, culminating in one of the most audacious conclusions on the big screen, ever. It’s easy to see now why Zabriskie left an indelible mark on audiences. If possible, it’s a punctuation mark that seems even more fitting today.

A 35mm print of Zabriskie Point screens
Sunday, April 20 to Thursday, April 24 at
the Cinéma du Parc; screenings will be
introduced by various speakers, including
Matthew Hays, Denis Villeneuve and André Turpin

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