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The mannequin idyll and the dust bowl, the New World faddish and primordial in Michelangelo Antonioni's astounding abstraction. Roving blurriness and prog-rock fuzz introduce the youth movement stuck in quarrel, Molotov cocktails versus "bullshit and jive," all talking and no listening. The activist (Mark Frechette) looks like Peter Fonda's stunt double, at the local jail the clerk takes down his moniker as "Carl Marx." A cop at the campus protest is shot à la À bout de souffle, and the aerial view of the escape evokes Godard's description of Los Angeles, a giant garage. Elsewhere, the half-hearted secretary (Daria Halprin) heads off to Arizona for a rendezvous with her boss (Rod Taylor). Death Valley is just the setting for the meet-cute, North by Northwest is reimagined as a mating dance between vehicles, the meander suggests Adam and Eve on Valium. "Hear any news about the strike?" "Not much. I prefer music." The scientific eye on the countercultural megillah divides America into billboard jungle and desert, Antonioni finds his most exciting landscapes there. A street boy playing the carcass of a piano gives the modern West, an ancient cowboy smoking at the saloon shows Sam Shepard's hand. Nude figures multiply for a roll in the sand, asinine sightseers anticipate Duane Hanson's sculptures. "They should build a drive-in up here. Hah! They'd make a mint." Blue trailer and red outhouse, the pink airplane gets a makeover of painted slogans, "a strange prehistoric bird spotted over the Mojave Desert with its genitals out." The mountain mansion is the ultimate in corporate sterility, the heroine adds true tears to a counterfeit waterfall and lets her blank gaze become a pulverizing laser. (The indelible apocalypse that follows might be Frost's "Once by the Pacific" as an exploding consumer catalog.) After this, only Bresson's Le Diable probablement. Cinematography by Alfio Contini. With Paul Fix, G.D. Spradlin, and Kathleen Cleaver.
--- Fernando F. Croce |