I wish I understood Antonionio better, as I find all his films weirdly riveting.
What went wrong? Per [Jon] Lewis [in Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture (2022)], Zabriskie Point’s problems started at conception and mushroomed during production. Antonioni was injudicious with his budget, and he rejected the notion that he should promote the film in a way that might persuade people to see it. The natural majesty of Death Valley didn’t fully suit his vision, so he “spent thousands of dollars dyeing portions of the desert various shades of pink and green,” Lewis writes. Antonioni also began “trucking in finer-grain sand” so that the film’s “extras might more comfortably cavort under the desert sun.” For various reasons, the production alienated park rangers, local laborers and Teamsters, the latter of which staged costly sickouts and work slowdowns. And after casting two unknowns—Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin—as his leads, Antonioni effectively described them as cyphers. “What happens to (the characters) is not important…People think that the events in a film are what the film is about,” he said. “Not true.”[…]
In the half-decade that followed the film’s release, [Mark] Frechette was convicted of trying to rob a bank and died in a strange prison gym incident that authorities called accidental.
— Kevin Canfield (Slant Magazine)
Synopsis: Anthropology student Daria, who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert, and dropout Mark, who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot, accidentally encounter each other in Death Valley and soon begin an unrestrained romance.