Zabriskie Point

It has been a long time since a film or a book has really made me think.

When I picked up Zabriskie Point from the library this weekend, I wasn't expecting anything special to happen. In fact, when I watched the film, nothing did. I thought the film was kind of boring, a little too preachy, and way too abstract.



But for the past two days, I can't get this film out of my head. Images from it haunt me and the more I analyze the film, the more it makes sense.

Zabriskie Point is a film, by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, which paints the landscape of 1960s America. It follows two 20-something Americans as their lives cross in an unexpected way.



Mark Frechette plays the sexy rebel-without-a-cause Mark, a college dropout who gets caught up in the radical movement of 1960s young America. Daria Halprin plays the sweet college student Daria who works part-time for a property developer building subdivisions in the California desert. Their lives intersect during a road trip to Phoenix.



I don't want to give too much of the film away. But it's a film that deals with the same problems America is facing today:

-Youth who are tired of feeling powerless
-Authority figures who abuse power
-Corporations inflicting culture
-Unhappiness derived from everything and yet nothing

The film was so radical for its time (there is a dusty orgy scene that takes place in a desert, along with several liberal themes) that production was continuously harassed by right-wing groups and the FBI.



Unfortunately, the film was so abstract and political, it ended up being a box office failure when it hit movie theaters in 1970. But it has since become a cult classic.

And I think many viewers of this film have the same reaction as me. Images of despair and uncertainty linger at the edge of memory. Visions of love and hate intertwine.

What I found even more fascinating was the real-life story of the two young actors themselves.



Mark and Daria fell in love during the filming of Zabriskie Point and after filming, they moved to a commune near Boston. In 1973, Mark and a few of his fellow cult members robbed a bank near the commune and were caught. To shed light on how similar Mark was to his Zabriskie Point character, here is his explanation for the bank robbery: "It would be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to death." In 1975, however, Mark died in prison during a freak weight-lifting accident.

Daria, on the other hand, went on to marry actor Dennis Hopper and co-founded a dance therapy institute with her mother.

I highly recommend this film to everyone. Love it or hate it, the message is clear: The world needs to change.

Cactus Flower

I recently discovered this little gem of a movie at the library last week.

It's called "Cactus Flower" and it stars Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, and Ingrid Bergman.



The 1969 film was the first for Goldie and it earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

The film is kind of dorky, but sweet. Walter Matthau plays Julian, a dentist who pretends to be married so he won't have to settle down with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Toni (played by Goldie). When Toni declares she wants to meet his other half, Julian asks his secretary (played by an alarmingly plain Bergman) to act as his wife. Obviously, hilariousness ensues.

The film is a bit odd. It never explains what Toni finds attractive about the washed-up dentist. He's not particularly wealthy or good-looking. He doesn't even have that great of a personality.

Plus, it was kind of perplexing that in all the time she had been living in her Greenwich Village apartment, Toni seemed to never have noticed her hot 20-something year old beatnik neighbor, Igor. Um, this is a guy who walks around her apartment complex shirtless for no reason throughout the film.

The only aspect of the film that really made me cringe, however, was Ingrid Bergman. I always remembered Ingrid as the beautiful Golden Era movie star who took my breath away in Casablanca. Any memory of that I had is gone. Now when I think of Ingrid Bergman, all I can remember is her dancing awkwardly to a go-go beat with Goldie Hawn, trying so hard to look hip when she just looked like a middle-aged woman with no sense of rhythm. My heart cried. And the costumes didn't do any justice to the Hollywood legend, they just made her look frumpy.



But, of course, the acting and plot are not the reasons I love this film.

It is all Goldie.







Her character is adorably nutty and utterly fabulous. Toni lives in a tiny studio apartment that she decorates with the bright neon colors of the late 1960s. She works in a popular record shop, where she gets to wear cool artsy clothes and hang out with hipsters. She loves to dance no matter where she is. She is young, full of life and energy and sweetness, and loving every second of it.







If you love fabulousness and you love comedy and you love fashion, go rent this film.

Did I mention it's quite a gem?

Beautiful and Damned

Boho chic. Hippie chic.

Before Kate Moss and Sienna Miller sported those trends, there was the woman who invented them: Talitha Getty.

She was a model, actress, and most importantly the Bohemian Queen, a hippie chic angel who glamorized the swinging 1960s scene.

Mod. Hippie. Stylish. Mythical. Her fashion sense from four decades ago continues to inspire designers such as Marc Jacobs, Gucci, Michael Kors, and Christian Dior.

Her style can be seen everywhere and yet her name has not graced the ears of most people in our generation.

Talitha was born in 1940 in Indonesia to Dutch parents. She was interned along with her mother in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Her father, a painter named Willem Pol, was imprisoned in a different camp, and after their release the couple separated.

She moved to England with her mother, who died in 1948, and was brought up by her father and his second wife, Poppet John, the daughter of the painter Augustus John.

As soon as she became a teenager, the gorgeous creature was swarmed by admirers. In 1966 Talitha fell in love with and married John Paul Getty Junior, the son of the richest man in the world, and heir to an oil fortune.







They quickly purchased the breathtaking 19th century Le Palais du Zahir in Marrakech, which became known as the Pleasure Palace.



The wild couple hosted some of the most famous parties of the decade in their new home. Some of their closest friends included members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, plus Yves Saint Laurent and Diane von Furstenberg.

Adorned in harem pants and silky blouses, the barefoot flower child entranced everyone she met.



“When I knew Talitha Getty my vision completely changed. I knew the youthfulness of the Sixties. Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future…”
- Yves Saint Laurent



During these years, the bohemian beauty gave birth to a son and dabbled in a little acting. Her career didn’t matter, however, because she was a style icon.





But like most icons, her pedestal began to crumble with the erosion of a serious drug addiction.





It was a problem she shared with her husband.

In 1971, at just 30 years old, the charismatic hippie with the long limbs and heartbreaking smile died of a heroin overdose in Rome.



She left behind a 3-year-old son and a fashion legacy that will never be out of style.