Word: daria
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Stunningly introduced, running breathlessly toward the camera in a frame worthy of romantically-inclined Hitchcock, Daria (Daria Halprin) represents for Antonioni semi-dormant awareness of the imperfect world she inhabits. A hippie girl who condescends to establishment employment when she "needs bread," this Antonioni heroine is a creature of fashion: she smokes grass (in contrast with Mark's ascetic "reality trip"), plays music on her radio rather than strike bulletins, and tends to pacify her frustrations and desires by retreating into claborate fantasies. An occasional line suggests that these fantasies are standard-operating-procedure. Mark speaks of the group...
...first part of the story deals ostensibly with the process that stirs Mark into some kind of militant action, the second half leads to a martyrdom which jolts Daria into a more responsible state of consciousness. Presumably she exits the film with enough commitment to end her complicity with a destructive society, an involvement symbolized by her attachment to the, businessman, Rod Taylor. Again, her basic reflexes are sound. Antonioni suggesting that she is capable of reaching a decision to resist forces' Antonioni condemns. In a brief meeting with some beautiful deranged children, corrupt as the angelic demons that...
...initially a strong and primeval love scene, goes wrong with the addition of Open Theatre couples miming sex, a curious semiclothed series of tongue exercises and reptilian advances, sort of mutually-indulged masterbation. Tone is destroyed more than central focus and Antonioni is forced to cut quickly-Mark and Daria after fucking turned chalk-white like the desert away from his logical climactic image earth-to a more conventional wide-angle pull-back of dozens of lovers dotting the landscape. Antonioni cuts to three panoramic long shots of desert terrain. The third shows: Mark and Daria in the distance. Before...
...Monica Vitti in Red Desert. and are often unsecing guidse through elusive situations in abstract environments. Also, we can parallel the student strike footage with the stock market scene in Eclipse: like the earlier film, Zabriskie Point balances personal travelogue with formally spectacular set pieces. The scenes of Daria driving through the desert, and the one of Mark buzzing her car with his an plane, are not travel montages in that great Easy Rider tradition but careful and exhaustive explorations of a specific image common to the American romance movie. Set-ups shift continually without returning to a master shot...
...spectacular final scene, a mercifully silent Daria "destroys" the ubiquitous symbols of ruling class decadence. The symbolic apocalypse of the conspicuously consuming society is so invigorating that the wide-eyed audience, given the chance to discharge their frustration over the movie's misses leaves the theatre in a forgiving mood...