I think I know why this film never caught on

Anyone who disagrees please feel free to respond...anyway, here's my take.

Regardless of whether you like or identify with the two characters you should at least find them believable as humans. The chick comes across as a ditz who was way too eager to screw some *beep* aggressively buzzing her in a plane. The rich guy may have been a capitalist but he seems like a nicer dude, and yet she fanaticizes about the death of him and everyone he knows...all because of some presumable psychotic carrying a gun who admits to stealing a plane who she fell in love with in one, drug-filled afternoon. Interestingly, there is no reason she should believe him when he says he did not kill the cop...and arguably neither should we. Like a lot of Michaelangelo Antonioni's movies the characters seem arbitrary, the action so random its like he wrote two different movies and spent as little effort as possible joining them together neatly. There is no way to really judge the characters as trustworty or "good." They have no arcs. We don't know them. They are boring and unknowable, but that basic information could have easily been communicated.

The problem more than anything is that this film represents a lot of the worst excesses and quirks of sixties cinema, ie it's all posturing. If you aren't sure what is happening within a film's plot you should at least know what the film is trying to convey. And even that isn't clear. The themes and elements were the correct ones (obligatory nudity and blather about war, consumerism, and revolution) but it is completely inert. A lot of the hippie-dippie dialogue in the desert made me want to fling my remote st the screen. I think people were looking for some message, or intense romance or story, and got annoyed by Antonioni's vagueness and thinly caricatured flower children. If anyone should be outraged by the film it should be them. Perhaps that was the director's point, that hippies aren't serious. They are just self-important dropouts(?)...who are dragging the whole socialist movement down, as selfish and shallow as everyone else in modern society the film mocks.

Another problem that goes along with the whole lack of a coherent point, is the fact that the film makes no sense, and I don't know whether anyone who wrote or edited the film noticed or cared. There is some subplot about meditating out in the desert, but the only thing going on is an orgy. If that is real. There is no way to know, and that subplot is dropped entirely without ever finding out who that guru was. The townspeople despise him for bringing in a bunch of screwed up ten year olds into the town. WTF? The hippies are bringing in horny, maladjusted kids to assault people and cause vandalism? I don't get this metaphor, if it even is a metaphor.