The Void Between

"I would never make a film outside Italy," Federico Fellini said recently. "I would be an alien, unable to understand the subtle shadings of character and gesture. I would be like a tree uprooted, unhealthy out of its own soil." It is canny advice that should have been heeded by the maestro's peer and countryman, Michelangelo Antonioni, whose movies seem to deteriorate in direct proportion to the distance they are made from home.

Blow-Up, that slick portrayal of swinging London, was pure frippery compared with such masterpieces as L'Avventura and La Notte. Zabriskie Point, his new film about America, lacks even the superficial vigor of Blow-Up. It is to be hoped that Antonioni never goes on location in Australia.

For an Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point is incredibly simple-minded and obvious. The scenario might have been written by a first-year student in film school. Antonioni's two protagonists are simply archetypical symbols of what Antonioni believes to be American youth. Mark (Mark Frechette) is a cool, angry college revolutionary who is "on a reality trip." Consequently, he rejects a marijuana joint offered him by Daria (Daria Halprin), a free-floating young Los Angeles secretary who prefers music to politics.

Mark, who seems to have shot a cop at a student strike, has stolen a small private plane and winged off to the California desert. Daria is taking a leisurely drive to Phoenix to meet her boss (Rod Taylor), who also seems to be her lover. These ambiguities remain unresolved and irrelevant; what matters is that boy and girl meet, love and copulate in the desert, accompanied by 35 couples (and two triples), who writhe in the gypsum in awful parodies of sexual ecstasy. "I always knew it would be like this," sighs a sated Mark as he and Daria gaze at postcoital desert vistas before going their separate ways. Each has profoundly affected the other, of course. Mark flies back to L.A. to return the plane. Daria, hearing on her car radio that Mark has been killed by the cops, soon envisages her boss/lover's house blowing into smithereens in a slow-motion ballet of destruction.

Child's Play. "We were talking," sing the Beatles, "about the space between us all," an anthem that might stand as a succinct statement of Antonioni's major obsession. But here, that space has become a void.

The imagery of the film is as obvious as the plot. When Mark is refused a free sandwich, Antonioni cuts to an oversize billboard advertising sandwich bread. Los Angeles, used as a metaphor for America, is portrayed largely in visual cliches: billboards, TV commercials, neon lights, gun stores, crowded freeways, shabby neighborhoods. The brief footage of riot and bloodshed seems child's play compared with Medium Cool, and the musical score--made up mostly of contemporary rock tunes--is so uncertainly used as to appear superimposed. The two newcomers who play the leading roles are, like the film itself, pretty but empty. To be sure, there are lots of beautiful shots of the desert, but it is chilling to think that Antonioni could achieve only pretty pictures and a rudimentary harangue about the American national character, which he does not even begin to understand. Located in Death Valley, Zabriskie Point is one of the lowest points in the U.S.; it occupies a similar position in Antonioni's career.

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