Word: antonioni
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...WHICH can feed a number of thematic interpretations. Antonioni shows us how the machinations of American society crush spontaneous beauty. His survey of the clashing enclaves of that society-the supercorporation in its computerized citadels of gleaming cold plastic, the angry cells of student revolutionaries, the frighteningly busy shops of unsmiling L. A. gun merchants, the calmly professional violence of city jail-clearly delimits who stomps and who gets stomped. The bastions of power, Antonioni says, are stagnant, sadistic, and vengefully jealous of youthful vigor. The existential point sounds very much like Ken Kesey's argument that the price...
...Antonioni makes quite sure that the thought isn't lost on the viewer. His unwieldly assortment of stereotypes and caricatured life-styles pounds out the message too heavily to be maximally effective. The police sergeants are pig's pigs, the passing midwestern tourist hops out of his souvenir-decalled camper with his fat, snorting wife and a brownie box camera, and no less fiery a militant than Kathleen Cleaver chairs the student meeting. And after enough contrasts of clips of gorgeous desert scenes interspersed with unbelievably Orwellian visions of the supercorporation (they used tanned mannequins, plastic-grass golf courses...
...Antonioni's effort is undercut to an even greater degree by the most inept cast he has ever used. Daria Halprin brings a supremely beautiful body, a maddenigly erotic bearing, and a ridiculously forced monotone to her lead role. Her youth is only physical. She speaks as if reading cue cards and says "hee-hee-hee" very quickly in her highest voice when she has to laugh...
...forced to accept the love affair on faith alone. Antonioni's decision to substitute physical beauty for acting ability leaves us outside as simple voyeurs. We logically understand what they can feel for each other, but they radiate nothing of their passion, the way Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet were able to do. It is difficult to be anything but sexually aroused by either of Antonioni's characters...
...when we are spared the leads' awkward vocalization of Antonioni's forced material (cowritten with two Americans and two other Italians), some superb cinema squeezes thurough. The marriage of Alfio Conti's dazzling photography with nicely chosen cuts of John Fahey, the Grateful Dead, the Stones, the Youngbloods, Pink Floyd, and Kaleidoscope is consistently right. Two nonverbal scenes in particular are so overwhelming as to warrant sitting through the whole movie. Both are fantasy projections of the heroes. While Daria and Mark make love in a Mojave riverbed (and it is fairly anti-social to do it in that much...