Blow Up
Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)
Most of the time, it’s hard to get beneath the thick patina of forty years of celebritised permissive society in order to realise why Blow Up was notorious, either for sexual explicitness or for Antonioni’s lofty condemnation of the disengaged hedonistic ethos of Swinging London. Only one of the sexual encounters has any real force at this distance in time – the one between the celebrity-photographer protagonist Thomas (David Hemmings) and Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), a young woman he’s taken pictures of in a park, kissing and larking with an older man. Jane comes to Thomas’s studio later on the same day and anxious to retrieve the film. The strength of the scene derives mainly from Vanessa Redgrave’s odd, unpredictable tension – Jane becomes almost threatening once she’s semi-undressed – but also, perhaps, from the fact that a sequence like this, because it was so relatively rare in 1966, was likely to be more carefully conceived. The image of Jane, wearing a skirt but topless except for a scarf, is unusually erotic. (The other side of this carefulness is that Redgrave’s breasts are protected from the camera more than those of lesser-known actresses in the cast.) Blow Up seems to have aged best as an interesting record of contemporary sidestreets and the people walking in them – or at least the passers-by who are incidental rather than consciously part of the design.
The film remains a puzzle in various ways. The meticulous visual compositions – the cinematographer was Carlo Di Palma – often draw attention to themselves as just that (and only that). Is this supposed somehow to reinforce the presentation of the photographer as an amorally egocentric voyeur; or is Antonioni suffering from the same condition as Thomas to such an extent that he doesn’t see the irony? Is the disconnection between the actors’ magnetism as images and their neutered, awkward vocals – they often sound dubbed – an integral part of the glittering-on-the-outside-dead-on-the-inside scheme of Blow Up? Or is it that the director lacks an ear for the nuances of spoken English and can’t hear how wooden many of the line readings are? This is a problem to some extent even with Hemmings – although he’s physically very convincing as the photographer at work and on the move, and he’s strong enough to carry the film. In retrospect, his physical suitability for the part not only makes Thomas an iconic image of the time but also has a sad ephemerality – given how heavy Hemmings got in middle age and how young he was when he died (sixty-two). A sub-mystery is that Sarah Miles, as one of the girls in Thomas’s life, gives a performance that’s tolerable – perhaps because her inherently loony quality (never enough to help her interpret a proper hysteric) gives a pleasing edge to her zombified role here.
Whether or not these elements are intentional, they’re effective in unifying the material. The famous core of the film – Thomas enlarging photos of what he accidentally caught on camera in the park until the images reveal nothing – is a long time coming but worth waiting for. It’s absorbing and scary. From the point at which he goes back to the scene of the crime and finds a (false-looking) corpse, Blow Up seems to go off course in a way that surely isn’t intentional. The discovery of the body seems to fracture the smooth surface of Thomas’s dispassion. When he returns home to find the Sarah Miles character having sex, he’s rattled all the more. This anxiety continues through a tedious episode involving a pop group (played by the Yardbirds), the smashing of a guitar and Thomas being set upon by hordes of clubbers grasping for fragments of the holy relic. (The sequence redeems itself somewhat when Thomas drops part of the guitar in the street outside, someone else picks it up and then, uninterested, drops it again.) Thomas eventually gets to find his agent at a stoned party and tells him about the corpse – but when Thomas then says, ‘We’ve got to get a photo of this’, he seems to have reverted to his heartlessly voyeuristic self and you wonder why he didn’t take shots when he found the (shot) man. On his return to the park the following morning, the corpse has disappeared. This is presented as if deepening the elusiveness at the heart of the film but it seems a reasonable thing to have happened in what is, as Jane reminds Thomas the previous day, a public place. There can be no excuse for the reappearance in the closing minutes of a cartload of white-faced mime artists (whom Thomas also encounters at the start of the film). The use of this lot may be eloquently symbolic but says only, ‘Quiet: continental European art film genius at work’.
The supporting cast includes Janet Street Porter in an uncredited role – but she was far from the only one here to fail (or decide not to try) to progress with an acting career. Among the proper actors are Peter Bowles (rather good as the agent), John Castle and Jane Birkin. Antonioni wrote the screenplay, ‘inspired by’ a short story by Julio Cortázar, with Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond. The music is by Herbie (in those days, according to the credits, Herbert) Hancock.
10 September 2008