ADAM NAYMAN ON THE BEGUILING INFLUENCE OF ANTONIONI'S BLOW-UP
At the Toronto Star, Adam Nayman writes under the headline: "Stylish and sinister, Blow-Up hits the Paradise theatre on Monday. Here's why you can't miss it" --
Existential uncertainty lurks in plain view in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," a time capsule of Mod-era London that, six decades later, looks like one of the signature movies of the 1960s.Loosely inspired by the exploits of the celebrated British photographer David Bailey — a talented gadfly whose portraits of cultural icons from the Beatles to the Krays made him something like England’s shutterbug laureate — the film stars David Hemmings as Thomas, whose candid (and surreptitious) snaps of two lovers in London's Maryon Park end up being scrutinized for evidence of foul play. The more that Thomas — and the audience — examine the grainy snaps, the more it seems like something terrible has happened; although the details (and the reasoning) remain blurry, we watch in the hope that the off-screen murder (if there was one) will come into literal and figurative focus.
It’s a classic Hitchcockian premise, shot through with illicit tingles of complicity and voyeurism — prowling through the greenery with his camera, Thomas could be a Peeping Tom — curated for its particular social moment with generous helpings of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll (the film includes a jangly concert performance by Jimmy Page’s band the Yardbirds). The atmosphere is one of chilly, free-floating dread; as seen through the lens of master cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, everyday locations become charged with mystery and menace.
For the critics who had anointed Antonioni as a major auteur based on his earlier, more austere Italian films, "Blow-Up's" surprising commercial success and breakthrough as a mainstream conversation piece was a vindication; for skeptics like critic Pauline Kael, the director was less a visionary than an opportunist, smuggling undergraduate pretentiousness into cinemas under cover of Pop Art. “Antonioni’s new mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seems to have a kind of numbing fascination,” Kael wrote in the New Yorker.
In 1974, coming off the world-beating success of "The Godfather," Francis Ford Coppola paid homage via the esthetics and plotting of "The Conversation"; in 1981, Coppola’s fellow New Hollywood innovator Brian De Palma — arguably Kael’s favourite American filmmaker — wrote and directed his own spiritual remake, "Blow Out," which melded Antonioni’s reality-versus-illusion themes with homespun political paranoia.
Antonioni would go on to experiment even more wildly through the home stretch of his career, but "Blow-Up" remains his most beguiling and influential feature: a thriller whose excitement is purely and powerfully metaphysical.