BLOWUP (1966) **1/2 Antonioni tries some new things, and like most avatars of revolution it looks fairly tame now that things have changed. No one gets all that excited about a few rooms full of people smoking pot any more, for example-truth is that it looks like a fairly dull party. Same thing with the ménage trois-the concept of young girls exchanging their bodies for a shot at fame just isn't all that shocking. It's not progress, certainly, but just another byproduct of evolutionary misfiring. Not as sad as veterans starving under the bridge, anyway. So the shock value's off, but there's still plenty left. Antonioni's characters are hedonistic but indifferent, their pleasure appears to leave little joy in its wake. To tell the truth I much prefer Barbra Streisand's happy, hyper-engaged characters (of the era) to the blank and pre-hopeless meanderings represented by Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles and Veruschka von Lehndorff here. Antonioni dances a thin line between surrealism and a representation of an increasingly real surrealism. Contrary to what's been written elsewhere, there is indeed a plot, and in fact a reasonably well developed one. What Antonioni has done, however, is litter the plot with numerous distracting opportunities for deviation and disengagement. There are a number of ways to approach these, but I would suggest starting with the fact that David Hemmings took peaceful photos of a park, in order to conclude his book of violent photos on a positive note, and it turns out that he not only inadvertently photographed an attempted murder in progress, but also prevented it. Work in concentric circles from there, don't just start with the first one or you'll never get anywhere. The scene with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and the rest of the Yardbirds playing to a collective representation of heroin sheep: sheep, that's right, not chic: the audience remains unmoved by the music, but suddenly becomes extraordinarily animated to the point of violence when presented the opportunity to obtain a broken guitar neck. What do you make of that? Well, it's tangible, it's of no value to others, who successively discard it...but maybe I've already analyzed more than Antonioni meant for us to do. His film may work best considered as a series of stills. Within this limitation his characters thrive-it plays to their strengths and precludes definitive consideration of their weaknesses. Same for the plot, same for the metaphors. From the opening dichotomy of the glowering plant workers and the young and merry pranksters, to the closing shots where Hemmings may have learned to allow his powerful imagination release from strict visuals, there's plenty of room to think all sorts of things. I think my favourite stills is Jimmy Page with mutton-chop sideburns and a big smile on his face.
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