Grade: F
“What did you see?” Ron asks Thomas in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up.
“Nothing,” Thomas says.
I watched Blow-Up.
What did I see?
Nothing.
Michelangelo Antonioni wrote and directed this film. It was called a masterpiece. Martin Scorsese advises all young filmmakers to see it. Brian De Palma used it as the basis for his film Blow Out and Francis Ford Coppola did the same with The Conversation.
But it’s an aimless wander through a wasteland.
I’d read that the film’s about the photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) who photographs a murder by accident. I watched Thomas drive around London, skip about a park taking pictures, and buy a propeller from a junk shop presumably for a photo shoot that never happens. I watched the film on DVD. The film went on and on and no murder came along. I kept looking at the DVD player to see how much time had passed. I wondered when I’d get to see the murder.
This is something I’ve only experienced in Taxi Driver: a plot and a protagonist so purposeless that I was begging for something violent, bloody and horrific to happen just so I could see something happen. I amused myself afterwards by imagining what Hitchcock would think of this film. I imagined him sitting in the cinema quietly until the lights go up and then asking me “Now does the film start?”
Blow-Up is misrepresented as a Hitchcockian thriller. The Criterion Collection describes it as “a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.” It sounds like a psychological thriller about a heroic common man who stumbles into a murder, but the murder doesn’t even happen in the first half of the film and Antonioni, unlike Hitchcock, couldn’t give a stuff about Thomas or any of his other characters. He constantly looks at them from a distance down hallways and across rooms and landscapes. When he shows Thomas taking photos in the park he does it from such a distance and in shots filled with so much empty space that Thomas is reduced to just a speck on the green. He’s not a hero. He’s an ant crawling across a blank page.
Blow-Up is a barren heath despite the mirage of a plot and of merit that’s been draped over it.