A marriage of big-studio youth exploitation flick and Italian modernist art film, Zabriskie Point was met with general confusion and even rage upon its release, but its vision of an early 1970s Los Angeles baking in its own heat-from both the culture within it and the deserts that surround it-is mesmerizing today. Studio executives may have hoped for some marketable sex from the counterculture plotline involving the doomed love between a tight-jeaned, plane-thieving rebel and a leggy, well-tanned hippie child, but Antonioni amusingly appears more aroused by the landscapes around the plot. Beginning in the cramped meeting rooms of voluble student radicals, Antonioni heads into Los Angeles proper in a blur of industrial signs and salvage yards held together by choking smog and the ambient din of clattering machines. Finally hitting Death Valley, he realizes his two grand set pieces: a love-in on the sand dunes, and the start of the American revolution, imagined by our young heroine in the most California way possible: as an explosion of plastic patio furniture, color TVs, and Wonder Bread.