What was once bold and daring in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is now tame. The London "mod" scene has been mocked in the Austin Power's movies. The nudity, sex and depiction of drug use have become common place and modern audiences have been known to chuckle at the so called "orgy" scene. The film, that was once hailed as one of cinema's most important, and named frequently as the best film of 1966, has not aged well. The shock value of showing something new and daring has all but dissipated.
But it's central message and themes have never been more relevant.The film is a study of a disconnected individual, who is distracted by the immediate sensory input of drugs and sex. He has no interests in what he does, and then one day through a coincidence, his passion his reignited. But it can't be sustained and he disappears back into the empty existence he had before.
The movie follows one day in the life of a photographer played by David Hemmings. When we first meet him he is coming out of a poor house. Not because he is broke, but because he goes under cover at night to sleep in the flop house so he can photo-document the men living there. He returns to his studio where he makes his bread and butter by shooting fashion photography. He engages in a photo shoot with a model that is both highly sexual yet very cold. He never really treats the model as a person and only looks at her through the camera. He seems unable to connect with her on a personal level.
We observe this distance between him and his subjects and the world around him. His life is full of sex, booze, women and drugs, and he is bored with it all. You can feel his discontent and weariness with what he does. It is telling that we never see any of the fashion photographs. There are none on the walls of his flat or in the darkroom. When he meets his agent we only see the pictures from the flop house. This is the work that has meaning for the photographer.
While on an outing he shoots some pictures of a couple in the park. Suddenly the woman is at him, demanding the film. He refuses. She follows him back to his studio where she confronts him again. This woman intrigues him. She sees him as a person. They engage in conversation and slowly she warms to him until he lets his guard down and she tries to steal the camera. He stops her, but now he is really interested to know what is on the film. He switches film roles and sends her on his way and begins to develop the film developing process.
The pictures reveal something and after hours of enlarging and studying he begins to believe he took pictures of a murder. Is there a man in the bushes with a gun? Is that a body in the grass?
To be forewarned this movie is not a thriller. There is no solution to the central plot device and there is no other information to who killed who. Some critics have suggested that it was all imagined, but I don't believe so. The photographer and therefore the audience, definitely see a dead body. It's just that the mystery is not the central element of the film.
It's an important film to see if you want to understand the French New Wave and see how modern film making changed in the 1960's. This was the first film made in the U.K. to feature frontal nudity. It's also a film that modern audiences react to in different ways. What was once considered "free love" is now seen as the callous and hateful treatment of woman, for example. It's a perfect time capsule of a period that is long gone, but still captures the disconnection most people feel in modern society.
At the Movie House rating *** stars
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