Fantastic Movie

I hope I'm not becoming one of these artsy fartsy people, but after Michelangelo Antonioni died a few weeks back, I read the obit in the Times and decided to check out some of his movies.

Enter another cheerleading routine for Netflix. Because of the way they distribute things, they've made movies like his so much more accessible to someone like myself. There's no way my local Blockbuster could stock the variety of movies they are able to.

So I checked out Blow-up over the weekend and was blown away (sorry, could not resist). I have a few more of his movies in my waiting list and can't wait to get my paws on them.

It's admittedly, per above, a bit artsy and off-beat, but was a highly entertaining statement on whether what we see really is what it seems. I hesitate to say much more on the off-chance that someone will take my advice and give this flick two hours...but I hope you do.

Here's the Times original review of the movie from 1966.

Blow-Up (1966)

December 19, 1966

BLOW-UP

By Bosley Crowther

Published: December 19, 1966

It will be a crying shame if the audience that will undoubtedly be attracted to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up because it has been denied a Production Code seal goes looking more for sensual titillation than for the good, solid substance it contains—and therefore will be distracted from recognizing the magnitude of its forest by paying attention to the comparatively few defoliated trees.

This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed. It is vintage Antonioni fortified with a Hitchcock twist, and it is beautifully photographed in color. It opened at the Coronet last night.

It marks a long step for Mr. Antonioni, the Italian director whose style of introspective visualization has featured in all his Italian-language films from L'Avventura through Red Desert, and in all of which Monica Vitti has played what has amounted to a homogeneous gallery of alienated female roles. It is his first film in eight years without Miss Vitti. It is his first major film about a man. And it is his first film made in England and in English (except for one vagrant episode in his three-part I Vinti, made in 1952).

The fellow whose restlessness and groping interests Mr. Antonioni in this new film is a dizzyingly swinging and stylish freelance magazine photographer, whose racing and tearing around London gives a terrifying hint of mania. He can spend a night dressed up like a hobo shooting a layout of stark photographs of derelicts in a flophouse, then jump into his Rolls-Royce open-top and race back to his studio to shoot a layout of fashion models in shiny mod costumes—and do it without changing expression or his filthy, tattered clothes.

He can break off from this preoccupation and go tearing across the city in his car to buy an antique airplane propeller in a junk shop, with virtually the same degree of casualness and whim as he shows when he breaks off from concentrating on a crucial job in his darkroom to have a brief, orgiastic romp with a couple of silly teenage girls.

Everything about this feral fellow is footloose, arrogant, fierce, signifying a tiger—or an incongruously baby-faced lone wolf—stalking his prey in a society for which he seems to have no more concern, no more feeling or understanding than he has for the equipment and props he impulsively breaks. His only identification is with the camera, that trenchant mechanism with which he makes images and graphic fabrications of—what? Truth or Fantasy?

This is what gets him into trouble. One day, while strolling in a park, he makes some candid snaps of a young woman romancing with a man. The young woman, startled, tries to get him to give the unexposed roll of film to her. So nervous and anxious is she that she follows him to his studio. There, because she is fascinated by him and also in order to get the film, she submits to his arrogant seduction and goes away with a roll of film.

But it is not the right roll. He has tricked her, out of idle curiosity, it appears, as to why the girl should be so anxious. How is she involved?

When he develops the right roll and is casually studying the contact prints, he suddenly notices something. (Here comes the Hitchcock twist!) What is that there in the bushes, a few feet away from where the embracing couple are? He starts making blowups of the pictures, switching them around, studying the blow-ups with a magnifying glass. Is it a hand pointing a gun?

There, that is all I'm going to tell you about this uncommon shot of plot into an Antonioni picture—this flash of melodramatic mystery that suddenly presents our fellow with an involvement that should tightly challenge him. I will only say that it allows Mr. Antonioni to find a proper, rueful climax for this theme.

One may have reservations toward this picture. It is redundant and long. There are the usual Antonioni passages of seemingly endless wanderings. The interest may be too much concentrated in the one character, and the symbolistic conclusions may be too romantic for the mood.

It is still a stunning picture—beautifully built up with glowing images and color compositions that get us into the feelings of our man and into the characteristics of the mod world in which he dwells. There is even exciting vitality in the routine business of his using photographs—prints and blow-ups and superimpositions—to bring a thought, a preconception, alive.

And the performing is excellent. David Hemmings as the chap is completely fascinating—languid, self-indulgent, cool, yet expressive of so much frustration. He looks remarkably like Terence Stamp. Vanessa Redgrave is pliant and elusive, seductive yet remote as the girl who has been snapped in the park and is willing to reveal so much—and yet so little—of herself. And Sarah Miles is an interesting suggestion of an empty emotion in a small role.

How a picture as meaningful as this one could be blackballed is hard to understand. Perhaps it is because it is too candid, too uncomfortably disturbing, about the dehumanizing potential of photography.

BLOW-UP (MOVIE)

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; written by Mr. Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond, based on a story by Julio Cortázar; cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma; edited by Frank Clarke; music by Herbie Hancock and The Yardbirds; produced by Pierre Rouve and Carlo Ponti; released by Premier Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes.

With: David Hemmings (Thomas), Vanessa Redgrave (Jane), Sarah Miles (Patricia) and Verushka, Jill Kennington, Peggy Moffit, Rosaleen Murray, Ann Norman, and Melanie Hampshire (Models).