Search - Zabriskie Point on DVD

A film that doesn't play by the rules

Doug Anderson | Miami Beach, Florida United States | 06/17/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Zabriskie Point is stunning as a piece of visual art. The campus scenes, the office interiors, the strange billboards and roadside stops along stretches of barren highway, the desert scenes, the world looked at from a small plane ...all of these visuals captivate the mind. Like many Antonioni films, the cinematography is a dream and individual stills belong in an art book/museum.

The characters are incomplete, only cursorily imagined, and the narrative is desultory and vague. In a way this works if one sees the film not as a critique of capitalist society or a study of radical political solutions to western materialism but as a record of what it feels like to be young and alive to possibility. To the young characters everything seems strange and alien and fails to meet their expectations of what life should feel like--to me that is what the film is documenting and that is what I like about it. The main character is not particularly drawn to politics nor does he feel in any way connected to the campus radicals that are pursuing a political agenda. He's a loner who lives by the beat of his own drum. He's an outsider even among outsiders. In many ways this makes him quintessentially American.

The film is not really about campus politics, rather its about a return to a more pastoral time in American life. The fact that the main character drives an old pick-up, and that the female lead drives an old car from another age supports the view that these are kids that simply don't feel at home in the modern world. Neither are campus radicals, what connects these two is that they are both nature lovers fleeing crass modernity. I think the fact that neither actor has been traditionally trained only adds to the films authenticity.

The enemy is ultimately a modernity which turns people into calculating capitalists or anti-western radicals, but neither of these stances really appeals to these two desert wanderers. What they want is something real and for them that something real is not American industriousness nor youthful radicalism. For them what is real is their strange meeting which can only take place outside the usual perimeters of society in a completely undefined world which is always old but also always new.

Antonioni does not play by the usual rules. He is an experimenter and his films simply do not fit into categories. Most film reviewers find fault with the lack of professional acting, or the lack of conventional narrative but I think these reviews miss the point. The concentration on visuals and liminal states of mind over clearly defined characters and narrative trajectories is what makes the film singular and memorable.

I would also argue that although the soundtrack plays an important part in this film, the most profound parts of Antonioni films are always the silences.
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