At the beginning of the 1960’s, Michelangelo Antonioni made artistic and challenging films revolving around the newfound affluent society in Italy. Movies, like L’Avventura and La Notte portrayed how to much idle time can be a curse rather than a blessing.
With his first English language film, being the British Produced Blow-Up, Antonioni does not stray that far from this topic. The main difference is that this time, we are treated to a main protagonist who uses idle wanderings as part of his profession. This is Thomas (David Hemmings in a star turning role), who is a very successful fashion photographer. Thomas is the king of his world and is in the middle of trying to produce a serious book of photographs visualizing the harder, and darker side of life, which is the opposite of the types of pictures he makes a living off of. Thomas lives in London during the swinging MOD cultural phenomenon, where long hair for men and mini dresses for women were just coming into their own. Antonioni’s movie is a wonderful time capsule of this period, with its loud music, liberating sex, brilliant colors, drugs, and cool language. Austin Powers would spoof this liberal period, many years later, to hilarious effect. Thomas thrives here and is one of the MOD’s royalty figures. He is young, artistic, successful, good looking and embraces the culture as if it belonged to him.
The movie shows both sides of Thomas the photographer. There is the man who dresses up like a hobo so that he can spend the night at a flop house to photograph the disenfranchised and there is the man who photographs a famous model (Veruschka von Lehndorff, who plays herself), as if he was making love to her. I felt that he was bored photographing fake beauties, and it was his book project that gave him his drive.
During a midday camera foray in an isolated park, Thomas comes across what looks like two lovers and photographs them from afar. The women played by a very young Vanessa Redgrave, demands that he hands over to her the pictures he took of her, for which he refuses to do. She follows him back to his studio and even offers sex in return for the photos. He purposefully gives her the wrong film roll, in order to get rid of her, which allows him to develop the real shots.
Through elaborate and fascinating scenes, Thomas slowly develops each picture from the park, where he discovers through blow-ups of the photos, something he believes is a dead body lying beside the lovers in the park. A mystery develops, as to who the body is, and if a murder had occurred. Other great directors like Coppola (The conversation), and De Palma (Blow-out), have taken this exact same premise to make taught, psychological crime thrillers.
Antonioni is not interested in making a thriller here. He is interested in using this seemingly thriller mystery premise, to showcase the new modern MOD lifestyle that was taking over the London Jet set at the time. From the music shown via a club concert by the hard rocking 60s band, “The Yardbirds” (Who’s guitarist Jimmy Page would go on to form, “Led Zeppelin”), to the cool language spoken by everyone and the brilliant colors of the clothes being worn.
There is also quite a lot of free sex going on. One sequence, which was copied and made violent a few years later by Stanley Kubrick (“A Clockwork Orange”), is a sequence where two teenage groupies barge into Thomas’s home studio and he happily lures them into a colorful orgy.
By luring us into this intoxicating world of fun and excess, Antonioni succeeded in making me forget that there may have been a murder occurring as part of the plot. For me the murder plot twist succeeded to sucking me into the atmospheric MOD culture world of 1966 London. It did not matter to me one bit, that someone may or may not have been killed. I was fascinated by the visual splendor of the movie and the atmosphere of a very specific time and location. Whether the film gave a conclusion to the mystery was not that important to me. I enjoyed the beautifully shot color scenes, and was so mesmerized by the stylized images that I almost forgot that someone may have been killed. That is the brilliance of this movie.
1001 Movies before you die 