It's been super-hectic for the past few weeks (really, since Frederick got out of the hospital) preparing classes for the new semester, and tonight I decided we deserved a break, so I put Jami in charge of choosing some viewing. She googled "Best Sixties Thrillers" and this was on the list. As I'd always meant to watch it, I was happy to agree. I knew it was an Antonioni film, but I knew that, unlike L'Avventura, it was (a) in glorious Technicolor, (b) filmed in England with English actors, and (c) supposed to be a lot more accessible and conventional than that famous first film. Well, two out of three ain't bad. It actually has a lot in common with L'Avventura, and actually, I would say that the characters seem in general more rather than less bizarre and disaffected, I think because they're speaking in English, so you can tell how weird they're being, whereas it's easy to imagine that's just how Italians act. That's oversimplifying things, and I did find it engrossing, and the acting in general excellent (perhaps the worst offender was, surprisingly, Vanessa Redgrave). But it is in no way a thriller, even if it contains a mysterious killing and many of the trappings of a thriller. But, of course, so does Camus' L'Etranger. The film is more-or-less carried by a young David Hemmings (who, apparently, beat out Terrence Stamp for the role, and is similarly blonde and waif-ish, albeit not as beautiful - he does have brilliant blue eyes, but they are surrounded by snake-like bulgy lids and he has rather sloppy lips and not much of a chin.
However, he does indeed successfully carry the film and is, as Jami pointed out, excellent at pretending to know what he's doing, which is, operate a camera and all the accoutrements (the "blow-up" of the title is something he does repeatedly in a dark room with photos he's taken). He's also excellent at conveying thinking, specifically in the daringly long scenes where he's blowing up the photos and staring at them in puzzlement
(which, we now assume, is what Mel Brooks is spoofing here). I can't imagine any studio nowadays allowing so much time to be given over to these scenes, but they work perfectly. Oh, and he is successfully unlikable (his character, Thomas (who I kept mentally calling David, whether because it's the actor's name or because I was thinking of David Bailey, by whom his character is almost certainly inspired [update: I just checked Bailey's Wikipedia entry and it says this explicitly]), I'm not sure) is pretty loathsome, particularly in his dealings with women) and yet still magnetic. I'm sure it's a mark of great directing that the film never explicitly gives you anything - in particular, most of the first hour just unfolds in almost real time: after an opening scene of a bunch of mimes (no, really - with white painted faces and all) drive in a Land Rover around the deserted streets of a fashionable part of London, and Thomas first emerges from a "doss house" dressed in rags, along with other vagrants, then trots up a side street and hops into a convertible Rolls, before showing up at his studio and jumping straight into a photo shoot first with a skeletally thin (to be fair, everyone in the film is very skinny - chalk it down to rationing and cigarettes) continental model, of whom he is very flattering, while at the same time practically lying on top of her,
and then of a group of models
whom he treats outright contemptuously, and instructs to keep their eyes closed
as he wanders out of the studio to go off on other mysterious errands. Because of the picaresque nature of the film I can't be certain of the order. He trots just round the corner to, what one would at first assume was his house, but seems to belong to an artist friend (played by BBC drama stalwart John Castle), who shows him a couple of his paintings and refuses to sell them to him. A girl (Sarah Miles), who seems to be pining for him gives him a massage and tells him he looks tired. (Later it emerges that he thinks of her as his woman, but she is actually with the painter.) He drives away (pursued by a couple of very young would-be models (one of whom is Jane Birkin)
whom he treats downright offensively (but they'll be back) down a street dominated by red-painted storefronts all advertising Pride & Clarke until he gets to an antique store, where he is treated very rudely by an old man who is sitting in for the owner. He goes for a walk in a park. The only other people in it are a couple whom he photographs from a distance until the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) notices and runs after him demanding the photos.
He refuses (rudely) saying it's just his job. He returns to the antique shop to find the owner (a young woman)
back, and discusses buying the store. Before he leaves, he buys a giant propeller, that looks like it could come off a spitfire or something of that size. After he and the young woman fail to load it safely in his convertible he asks that she have it delivered. He meets up with what one presumes is his literary agent (a very young Peter Bowles, definitely playing against type (we next see him smoking a joint at a party later on) with a goatee)
and shows off some of the pictures he took at the doss house that will be in his new book and says excitedly that he's just taken the photos that will end the book (beauty to counter the squalor). Then off to his house to find Vanessa Redgrave has tracked him down. A long interlude where she tries to persuade him to give up the photos, then tries to run off with the camera, then he gives her a fake roll of film, she poses with her top off, they have a roll in the hay, he demands her number, she leaves (and we never see her again). (The number turns out to be fake.) He blows up the pictures and we have the best scene that I described earlier, where nothing is explicitly stated but we see him blowing up parts of the background to reveal a man with a gun in the hedge menacing the couple, and then (in a picture he took of Vanessa Redgrave's back as she leaves after running after him) the body of the man lying behind a bush (none of which he'd noticed at the time). There's a knock at the door and he expects it to be her coming back, but it's the two wanna-be models. He "seduces" them in a way very similar to the scene in Clockwork Orange when Alex lures two dolly-birds back from the record store and that would get him arrested in any just world, and then he kicks them out (telling them he'll take their photos "tomorrow"). Then it gets even more fragmentary in my recollection: he goes back to the park and sees the corpse. He goes to a concert given by the Yardbirds (featuring both Jimmy Page
and Jeff Beck, who excite the previously zombie-like crowd into action by smashing his guitar and throwing the pieces into the middle of the audience). Thomas grabs the broken neck of the guitar and runs out, pursued by many, until he is safe on the streets, at which point he dumps the guitar neck. So.. why did he take it? (Why does he do anything - why is he trying to buy the antique shop? He makes some comment to some financial advisor that indicates that he thinks the neighborhood is about to explode because he's spotted "queers and poodles" around the place.) Then he finds Peter Bowles at a party and tells him about the murder and they talk about calling the police (oh, he's also done this with the not-girlfriend who comes to his house where he has just discovered that all of his blow-ups (but one that fell beside the fridge) have been taken, along with all his rolls of film, after he drops in on the painter's and finds her having sex with him) or going back to the park to photograph the corpse (you know, because there's no other evidence) but instead they just smoke weed and Thomas passes out on a bed. And of course, the next morning, the corpse is gone. Oh, and we get a reprise of the mimes.
What to make of it? Well, I don't think you can talk about Antonioni without using the word "alienation". There might be a commentary about swinging sixties London in particular, but I'm not sure he's interested in singling out lessons about particular times or places. People are just mysterious - selfish, unhappy, aimless. At least that's what I got from it. Thriller? Not so much. But for something so arty and meandering, it was thoroughly engrossing.
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