Film review

  • Zabriskie Point

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michelangelo Antonioni (1970)

    After using Swinging London for Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni crossed the Atlantic and headed for California, epicentre of the American counterculture, for his next picture.  Zabriskie Point, named for a location in Death Valley and set in the present day, starts in a crowded room on a university campus in Los Angeles.  A group of students – some black, more white – are discussing plans for an impending protest.  It’s not a typical Antonioni scene.  We associate him with images of few or lone figures in large spaces.  The students’ debate, with words flying thick and fast, is sharply different from the enervated musings of characters in much of his earlier work.  The nature of political engagement here is, for him, unusually explicit:  one of the black students vigorously insists, for example, that middle-class whites aren’t socio-economically qualified to be revolutionaries.  As the camera darts about the room and the students argue, Antonioni seems to be after a quasi-documentary style though you start to suspect his heart may not be in it.   The camera keeps returning to a photogenic white male student.  This is Mark (Mark Frechette), who makes himself unpopular when he eventually speaks, announcing that he’s ‘willing to die, but not of boredom’ for the students’ cause.  He then leaves the room.

    Zabriskie Point nevertheless continues with the student protest theme for a while longer.  At first, the priority seems to be to ridicule the police who make arrests at the next day’s demo.  The film’s team of writers includes Sam Shepard and Tonino Guerra (as well as Claire Peploe, Fred Gardner and Antonioni himself) but the humour, in keeping with the setting, is sophomoric – and snobbish.  When an arrested academic gives his job as Associate Professor of History, the cop taking down details says that’s too long and that ‘clerk’ will do instead.  Mark hasn’t taken part in the protest but arrives at the police station to bail out his roommate and manages to get himself arrested.  Asked his name, he replies, ‘Karl Marx’.  It rings no bell and he’s asked to spell the surname.  We then see the form being filled in – ‘Marx … Carl’.  This is such a clumsy joke:  why doesn’t the benighted cop just write ‘Marks … Carl’ without asking for the surname spelling?

    The tone changes sharply with a confrontation in which the police tear-gas students and shoot one of them.  A police officer too is shot and killed:  Antonioni’s editing leaves it intentionally unclear whether Mark – who, after being released from custody, bought a gun from an LA shop – is responsible for this death.  At any rate, he now feels he has to Get Away.  He goes to a municipal airport, steals a small aircraft and flies off to Death Valley, the desert beyond the city.  It’s there that Mark meets up with Daria (Daria Halprin), who has been introduced in a parallel narrative.  She’s driving across the desert in the direction of Phoenix, Arizona to meet her boss, the property developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor).  Mark catches sight of Daria while she’s standing outside her car.  Once she resumes her journey, his plane repeatedly buzzes her vehicle.  After Daria gets out and lies face down in the sand, Mark flies the plane just a few feet above her body.

    Although it naturally recalls Cary Grant and the crop-duster in North by Northwest, the buzzing plane is the most rhythmical and dynamic sequence during the first fifty minutes of Zabriskie Point.   Not long afterwards, I walked out of NFT1, for two main reasons.  First, because once Mark and Daria are together in the desert, Antonioni seemed to have already reached his destination.  Images of Los Angeles early on – especially a view out of the office windows of Lee Allen (LA, geddit?) high in a skyscraper – reflect an outsider’s fascination with modern American cityscape, and the fascination is briefly infectious.  In contrast, Death Valley is, on a massive scale, echt Antonioni country.   He regularly ends up in physical and spiritual terrain like this.   Second, Zabriskie Point is, in major respects, feeble.  I admit I went to see it at BFI because I was curious as to why this work of a supposed master had flopped critically as well as commercially on its original release.  It served me right that my curiosity was satisfied quite soon.

    The opening credits introduce the film as ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point’, followed by ‘with’ Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin.  Even allowing that both were virtual unknowns, the ‘with’ downgrades the importance of the two main actors to an unusual degree.  (Also unusual, and perhaps another indication of where priorities lie, is that the opening credits cover in detail the music on the soundtrack, not only the original music by Pink Floyd but also numbers by the likes of the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.)   Once you’ve been watching Frechette and Halprin for a while, though, you can understand why the credits considered them subsidiary.  They may be lovely to look at but they can’t act.

    While Antonioni’s abiding interest in alienation means it’s possible that the principals’ inexpressive faces and voices are being used to illustrate lack of affect, I doubt it.  Even in Zabriskie Point‘s opening sequence, the flow of supposedly heated debate is repeatedly interrupted by wooden line readings from other young performers in the cast.   In an early scene, Lee Allen (played by a proper actor who, like G D Spradlin as Allen’s business associate, thereby seems almost incongruous) appraises a promotional piece for a planned resort-like development in the desert.  The human figures in this commercial are mannequins.  The sequence makes its point but would do so more strongly if the mannequins were noticeably less animated than the actual people on the screen.   Once Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin got together, I couldn’t face watching them try and fail to interact.

    The BFI used as the programme note a 1970 Sight and Sound review by Julian Jebb, one of the minority of favourable reviews the film received at the time.  Jebb concludes by describing it as ‘poetry … I suspect it will prove revolutionary in the history of the cinema’.  It’s a relief to know that his suspicions were unfounded. The only compunction I felt about parting company with Zabriskie Point was that, as I removed my jacket from the back of my seat in NFT1 when I got up to go, I disturbed the snooze of my immediate neighbour, a youngish woman who seemed to have dropped off a while before.  I hope she got back to sleep again soon.

    19 February 2019

  • Foxtrot

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Samuel Maoz (2017)

    The trailer makes clear that casualties of war are an essential theme of the Israeli film Foxtrot but also hints at an eccentric, even a playful, humour.  At a military checkpoint, a soldier does a zany dance with his rifle; the traffic barrier rises to let a lone camel on the road amble through.  These moments prove to be no guide to the overall style and tone of the writer-director Samuel Maoz’s second dramatic feature (he’s also made documentaries), which are, respectively, self-consciously artful and lugubrious.  A few words spoken in the trailer are a more accurate indicator of what’s in store.  A male voice explains the step sequence of the titular dance:  ‘No matter where you go, you always end up at the same starting point’.

    Foxtrot in effect comprises three acts.  In the first, Michael and Dafna Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler) answer a ring on the door of their Tel Aviv apartment.  As soon as Dafna sees two military uniforms on the threshold, she realises the purpose of their visit and faints.  The senior army representative (Danny Isserles) – labelled ‘Death Notification Officer’ [DNO] in the film’s IMDB cast list – breaks the bad news to Michael:  his and Dafna’s son Jonathan has died in combat.  After sedating Dafna and putting her to bed, the DNO gets her shocked husband to drink a glass of water and urges him to continue to do so once an hour for as long as he feels unable to eat.  The DNO sets up an hourly alarm on Michael’s phone to remind him to do so.  One immediately striking thing about these opening sequences is that the husband doesn’t make any move towards his wife while she lies unconscious and the army men attend to her.  Perhaps he’s numbed by the news about Jonathan but the effect is to suggest a distance between Michael and Dafna.  This stays in your mind as Maoz goes on to describe, in the film’s later stages, their less than happy marriage.  Striking too in these early scenes is the DNO, who takes control of the situation calmly, respectfully yet somehow sinisterly.

    This is the strongest part of Foxtrot, thanks especially to the effective twist that climaxes it.  In the interim, Maoz describes Michael’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the officers’ visit.  His brother Avigdor (Yehuda Almagor) comes over to help prepare a death notice and so on.  Michael goes to a nursing home to tell their mother (Karin Ugowski), who has dementia.  We meet the Feldmans’ daughter Alma (Shira Haas) and Dafna’s sister (Ilia Grosz).  An army rabbi (Itamar Rotschild), also a bit sinister or perhaps just clueless, visits the apartment to run through funeral arrangements but is evasive when Michael asks about seeing his son’s body.  These episodes are punctuated by the phone alarm sounding (and water being duly drunk).  The alarm serves as a reminder too that all this is really happening to the stunned, horrified Michael.  Certain other details – when, for example, he looks in on, and seems transfixed by, a room of elderly couples at a foxtrot dance class – are more dreamlike.  Is it possible that the nightmare Michael finds himself in is just that?  In a way, it is.  The DNO and his sidekick return to the apartment to announce there’s been a mistake:  the dead soldier is another Jonathan Feldman.  Michael’s reaction is convincing.  In light of what he’s been put through in the last few hours, he’s angry rather than euphoric – and anxious for confirmation that the army hasn’t got things wrong a second time.  He demands that Jonathan be sent home immediately.  To ensure this happens, he makes a phone call to a friend who has contacts with the top brass in the Israeli Defence Forces.

    In the second of the film’s three parts, the action switches to Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray) and his three army colleagues (Dekel Adin, Shaul Amir and Gefen Barkai), all four of them very young men, at their checkpoint somewhere in the desert.  The decided visual style of the first part – overhead shots that give an abstract and/or disorienting quality to images that might not be remarkable at eye level; slow and deliberate movement of the camera towards and away from what it’s showing – imposes itself even more strongly.  The situation and routines of the army unit (whose checkpoint is code-named Foxtrot) are presented as boring to the point of absurdity.  Until the closing stages of Act 2, the camel’s arrival at the checkpoint amounts to something of an event.  The tempo changes and the mood darkens when two cars are stopped at the barrier.  The soldiers order a man and woman in the first car to get out of the vehicle and stand in the pouring rain:  the woman (Irit Kaplan), dressed up for the evening, is painfully distressed to have her gown and hairdo ruined.  The second car contains four Palestinians.  They’re about to be allowed through when the driver (Firas Nassar) notices the dress of the woman[1] beside him is trapped in the car door.  As she opens it, an object falls out.  There’s a yell of ‘Grenade!’ and the soldiers open fire, killing all those in the car.  The camera reveals the offending object was not an explosive device but a lager can.

    Like the capper to Act 1, this moment has strong immediate impact.  The after-effect is another matter.  It’s now clear the story is going to be built around a succession of mistakes and, when a military superior (Aryeh Cherner) tells the young soldiers to keep quiet about what’s happened (a bulldozer having been used to bury the car and its occupants), a critique of the Israeli army.   From this point on, now that Maoz has shown his hand, the film pays quickly diminishing dividends.  Because the action is consequently less involving, the contrived image-making becomes dominant and starts to feel like the priority.  Foxtrot is excessively designed:  the fact that Michael is an architect may go some way to explaining the severe tastefulness of the Feldmans’ apartment but that’s only one element of the prevailing artiness.  Jonathan, for his part, wants to be a cartoonist and regularly draws, to while away the hours during military service.  Maoz’s animation of his drawings supplies a bridge between the second and third acts which is striking and inventive albeit indebted to Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008).  Act 2 ends with Jonathan receiving word that he’s to return to his parents in Tel Aviv and the start of his journey home.  The focus then returns to Michael and Dafna for Act 3, in which it’s soon revealed that Jonathan never made it back.  He died, this time for real, in a road accident en route.

    In view of what’s gone before, we spend most of the rest of Foxtrot waiting to find out what appalling-cum-laughable goof brought about that accident.  Maoz leaves it to the very end to reveal that the camel – or, at least, a camel – was the culprit.  A jeep carrying Jonathan swerved to avoid the animal and crashed down an embankment.  The last half hour of the film consists mostly of a gloomy, grinding showdown between Michael and Dafna about What Went Wrong with their life together.  The contributory factors include Michael’s treatment of the family dog.  Although the camel has the lead non-human role, Foxtrot’s most upsetting moment comes when Michael, as he tries to absorb the news of Jonathan at the start, kicks the dog hard and we hear its cries of pain.  A bit later, he fusses it affectionately and this seems to confirm his cruel act as an aberration – an indication of the state Michael was in after first hearing of his son’s death.  But no – from what Dafna says during their face-off, it seems her husband puts the boot in regularly.  These later stages are briefly enlivened by Shira Haas’s fleeting reappearance as Alma and by the uncharacteristic smiles and giggles of Michael and Dafna after they’ve smoked a joint together.  Lior Ashkenazi gives a committed performance but is required to be almost relentlessly and, as a result, monotonously sombre:  the rich, deep laugh that comes out of him when Michael is high is water in the desert.  (Ashkenazi somewhat resembles Steve Carell.  It’s hard to resist the temptation of thinking that if Carell carries on taking increasingly earnest roles, he may eventually end up in a movie like Foxtrot.)

    If Lior Ashkenazi’s laugh comes as a welcome surprise, the last shot of the Feldmans does not.  They perform a tentative, doleful foxtrot – by this stage, a real dance of death – on the kitchen floor. In addition to the mistake or misjudgment that brings each third of the film to a close and his fatal error in insisting on Jonathan’s immediate return, Michael describes to Dafna, during their big set-to, an incident that occurred during his own military service years ago.  This resulted in one of his colleagues, rather than Michael himself, being blown up by a landmine.  It’s not made clear why Michael has never confided in his wife about this before, though it’s not hard to guess the explanation either.  By this point in the narrative, the audience is expecting Samuel Maoz to keep supplying these unthinkable twists of fate and Maoz knows it.

    Foxtrot was publically controversial in Israel, where Miri Regev, the Minister of Culture in the Netanyahu government, deplored what she saw as ‘the result of self-flagellation and cooperation with the anti-Israel narrative’.  She judged it ‘outrageous that Israeli artists contribute to the incitement of the young generation against the most moral army in the world by spreading lies in the form of art’.  Maoz clearly does intend to attack Israeli military policy and process but plenty of viewers outside Israel may well receive his film as an anti-war tract more generally.  This viewer didn’t find it a persuasive one, though.  While it’s true that none of the shocking accidents in the story would have occurred if a conflict hadn’t been taking place, each is the result of human error or bad luck rather than intention.  What’s more, Maoz, through making bleakness pervasive, conveys no sense that life would be beautiful if not for war (which is hardly to blame for the Feldmans’ crap marriage, for example).  You remember, as much as anything, the maltreated dog and the woman drenched at the checkpoint.  By the end of Foxtrot, Maoz seems to have been using war to epitomise a larger misery, viciousness and futility in the human condition.

    17 February 2019

    [1] I can’t locate this character in the IMDB cast list.

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