"Blow-Up" (1966) - Movie Review

We see what we want to see and what we see may or may not exist. This is the core content of the film “Blow Up” directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. How the film arrives to that is an excruciating bizarre and unspoken symbolism of the so called life of a photographer. This is the first English movie made by the Italian director.

The film is an approximate twenty hour life of a photographer. He sees things and something appeals to him. He immediately grabs his device of capture and collects it as a time capsule. After a thorough orgasmic photo shot with a model and frustrating session with other few models, he sets out to the city. He enters an Antique shop where the shop keeper does not seem to like his presence. He then follows a couple sharing an intimate moment. He hides behind bushes and takes pictures. The lady notices it and demands the pictures. He refuses and flees away. Somehow she finds the residence of him and demands the pictures. He gives her some other film roll. Then he sees something strange in the pictures. He blows up and further blows up. Something emerges out of the bushes. It seems he just shot a murder.

There are classic art works in these 111 minutes of motion picture. The final scene marks the pinnacle of it. But the way it has been arrived is painful. The fragments of uneven and totally unrelated sequence are irritatingly slow. The characters wandering without any purpose or action seem uninteresting. I do get the fact in the end that everything is nothing and nothing may be everything, but the body of the picture should not necessarily be so boringly bizarre. The initial photo shot and the way of presenting the photographer is artistic and tells a lot about him. He is a man with a passion. His visual imagination of reality goes far away. He seems totally emotionless. Whatever the small reactions he gives seem to be real but still not validated. He is complex.

The symbolism and the form of how the screenplay navigates should have some purpose. The philosophy of existentialism and the perception of reality could have been given in more interesting manner. Even after properly receiving what the director tries to tell, there seem to be a vacuum. The life of the photographer with glamour in front and yet nothing attached emotionally is evident. The same kind of substance was handled brilliantly in “La Dolce Vita”. There the movie is exhaustive. It sucks the energy out and at the end of it; we feel totally tired and do not want the orgy the main character goes through. The concept of existentialism and the signs used were subtle and powerful. Even after draining the entire power from the viewers, there is the connection we make to the character. We do not know him any layer below but we fancy some of the things he does. The photographer in “Blow Up” seems to be shallow, rude and socially non-reactive. Somehow I was not able to believe that the perception of him by the viewers might be totally different as the movie says. Even if he is imaginary and non-existent, he still seems to be the same unknown guy with nothing inside him.

The film does not put a confusing end or something extremely complex. The final scene actually is brilliantly portrayed representing the art as well as the philosophy. The start and the end marked the movie’s artistic nature. The remaining part fails to connect and give out what should have been the ultimate journey towards the path of imaginative realism of perceptions. In the end when we realize that what we see is nothing and may be everything, I felt everything at that moment and in between it was nothing.