Daria, amazed. "But don't you see? There are no terrible things."

Mark, amazed. "Far out."

But 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 dirt), more and more lovers seem to materialize all over the desert basin until it is covered with playfully wrestling, fornicating bodies that tumble down the dunes in twos and threes and fours. It was as happy a post-revolutionary vision as anyone has ever imagined.

And in a 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.

Antonioni makes it obvious that he is rooting for America's rebelling youth. "I like everything they do," he recently said, "even their mistakes, their doubts." The moment applies neatly to his own film. Zabriskie Point is not a good movie. It is a weak statement with isolated flashes of brilliance. But even Antonioni's mistakes are likeable.