Review of Blow-Up (1966) by Kenneth L — 03 Sep 2011

This is a movie that, if you showed it to a large audience representative of the general population, about 10% of the audience would say that the movie was a brilliant existential story about alienation and being unable to make sense of a random and chaotic universe, and the other 90% would say that it was the most ridiculous excuse for a movie they've ever damn well seen, and they would like their money back, thank you very much. I can sympathize with both reactions. The movie is successful at what it wants to do, but what it wants to do is almost insanely frustrating for the viewer.

The movie is billed as a murder mystery, and it kind of is, but it willfully violates just about every rule of the mystery genre you can possibly think of. Let me count the ways this movie violates expectations associated with the mystery genre: 1) The mystery elements, which usually emerge within the first fifteen minutes or so of a film in the genre, do not show up until a full hour into the movie. 2) The investigator is neither a brilliant and eccentric thinker like Sherlock Holmes, nor a jaded but vulnerable and lovable gumshoe like Philip Marlowe, but a bored, boring, contemptuous, misogynistic dickhead photographer who isn't interested in solving the case or seeing justice done, but only in getting some good pictures. 3) In a classic mystery story, every detail should contribute something to the overall explanation of the mystery; in this film, a great deal of what happens does not relate to the mystery in any way. 4) We don't find out who the victim was. 5) We don't find out who the murderer was. 6) We don't find out why the murder happened. 7) Nobody is arrested or caught or punished at the end. 8) Nothing is resolved. 9) Instead of ending either with an explanation or with the hero being rewarded for his efforts, the movie ends with the aforementioned dickhead protagonist watching some profoundly annoying mimes pretend to play tennis with imaginary rackets and balls.

You can imagine how this could get frustrating.

As the photographer, David Hemmings constantly hits one note of dead-eyed ennui. This is no doubt the way he was directed to act, as that note of soul-crushing boredom is basically what everyone else in the film goes for as well; and, if everything I've read about the film's co-writer and director Michelangelo Antonioni is accurate, dead-eyed ennui was to him what suspense was to Hitchcock, what pop culture is to Tarantino, and what irony is to the Coen brothers - that is to say, his signature theme/technique. This is most obvious, and most hilarious, when the protagonist wanders through a rock concert by the Yardbirds at which all of the fans in attendance look like propped-up coma patients. Oh, how existential of you, Antonioni! Verily, life is empty and meaningless.

The film is well made in the sense that it looks and sounds just how the director wants it to. I must admit that the sequence in which the photographer begins to piece together that a murder may have happened through looking at blow-ups of his photographs is brilliant in an understated way. You really can't enjoy this movie in the same way you would enjoy a conventional movie, since it deliberately gives you none of the satisfactions you might expect from it. But if you can handle that, it is an interesting and unique work.