Blow-Up

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Release Date: 1966

Should this be on the list?
Without question. This has to fit in my top 100 movies of all time.

Rating: 5 Stars out of 5

Would I watch this again?
Yes, most definitely!

It’s been a tradition of ours to eat pizza, drink a cocktail, and watch a movie together on Friday nights. This tradition is about five or six years old at this point, and we’ve covered a lot of ground.

I learned fairly early on that I can’t just pick any movie, even if I had seen it before and liked it. I totally whiffed on The Great Escape, for instance, which I thought was a great movie in my twenties. And it is totally a great movie for a man in his twenties. But *spoiler alert* most of them get caught, or shot, except for James Coburn, who used his terrible Australian accent to get to freedom. Laura reasoned, and it is logical, that it can’t be a Great Escape if only two people make it out alive and uncaptured. For us, The Great Escape has now become a code word for “movie Laura doesn’t want to see because everyone dies in the end.”

So my bad.

Even more difficult, we’ve tried to make it a movie that neither one of us have seen before. Therefore, in selecting a movie, I have to walk the tightrope and do my homework. Is it sad? Hard pass. Does it end in a terrible way? Again, hard pass. Gory? Don’t even think about it.

For that reason, I started using a method I cobbled together from an HGTV show we watch, utilizing three styles of design (or, in this case, movies): the safe choice, the intriguing choice, and the out-there choice. The safe choice is something we’ve already seen, usually an old black-and-white comedy (think The Palm Beach Story). For the intriguing, I’ll go with something that came out in the last 10-15 years (think The Big Short). The out-there choice is reserved for movies that make this list.

Criterion started streaming Blow-up, so I had to throw it into the Out-There pile. It’s been one of those movies that is strangely hard to find, despite its status as a landmark film. We had watched L’Avventura before, and had both enjoyed it. I went on to watch La Notte and Red Desert on my own, and found that Antonioni definitely has his themes. Chances are, if you’re watching a movie with gorgeous people looking somewhat sad and drifting around from place to place, you’ve stumbled on to his work.

In Blow-up, these come in the form of a roving band of mimes and clowns tooling around London in a jeep, an immobile crowd watching the Yardbirds perform, and a sex scene that wasn’t really a sex scene (or maybe it was) and a murder that no one seems to be investigating.

Thomas (David Hemmings) is a hotshot photographer in London who balances between taking shots of extreme poverty or high fashion. One day he comes upon Vanessa Redgrave in a park (as one does), who is having a slightly heated conversation with a man. It’s such an interesting scene, that he decides to take pictures of the encounter, and later, which processing the images, he spots another man hiding in the bushes, and when he enlarges the image, discovers what looks like the body of a man at the very edge.

This has been the description of the movie that I’ve read for years before I actually saw it, and strange to say, there’s not much more to tell. However, this is not to say that the movie is slow and uninteresting. Like most of Antonioni’s work, everything sort of unfolds, not really working to any sort of logical conclusion. In the same way that L’Avventura never really discovers what happens to the girl, we never really find out what happens to the man, and maybe in the end it doesn’t matter.

At any rate, it’s a masterpiece, and most certainly should be included on this list.