Zabriskie

Slavoj Zizek said once that Zabriskie Point is Antonioni's worst film because it's sincere about love, let alone hippie love. True, the film tells where the tetralogy shows, and its blatant case against consumerism is schmaltzy. Its claim about consumer society is marvelously subtle.

The film can be seen as flexing an individual's anti-social resolve to the point of fracture. The liberty that the two had come to know in the desert (a liberty cinematically enhanced by the addition of a kaleidoscopic cadre of imitators) is only possible outside of human community. The lovebirds escape in technological vessels which, contrary to their purpose, imprison their occupants and effect the tragic reformation--even deformation--of the human back into a socially acceptable shape. In one case the deformation is fatal. So as the lovers part, they guarantee the impossibility of their love and simultaneously secure the space for freedom outside society. This is a subtle take on standard counter-culturalism and affirms, rather than destabilzes, its founding principle.

Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import)