Blow-Up (1966)

BLOW-UP  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michelangelo Antonioni
    David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles,
    John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Verushka

Spoiler Alert: If you've never seen "Blow-Up", you might want to do that before you read this review. 

Isolation and alienation blend and blur in a murder mystery set in mod, mid-'60s London. David Hemmings, who never did anything this good again, plays a cool, brooding photographer who's poking around in a park one day when he spies a couple off in the distance and sneaks a series of shots of them. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) chases him down and asks for the pictures. He tricks her by switching rolls and develops the film back at the studio, crops and enlarges the prints, and starts to suspect that, without knowing it, he's photographed a murder. For a movie that's so time-specific, this holds up really well. It still feels modern 50 years on. It was shot during the heyday of Carnaby Street, yet the city's quiet in a way that seems otherworldly. The streets are nearly empty. A raucous truckload of mimes motor about endlessly, improvising little bits of theater for no real audience except themselves. The Yardbirds perform in a cavernous club to a roomful of spectators who either dance trancelike or stand still as statues, staring straight ahead. "I thought you were in Paris," Hemmings says to the model Verushka at a party where the air's thick with pot. "I am in Paris," she replies, off in a zone of her own. In the end, the mystery goes unsolved. The pictures, the corpse and the woman are gone. The photographer's back in the park, where the mimes are acting out a tennis match. The ball goes back and forth for a while, and then it goes sailing over the fence and lands not far from the photographer. The ball does not exist, but the photographer picks it up anyway, and tosses it back into play. He watches the game, his eyes moving back and forth, and now he can hear it, the thwack-thwack-thwack of an imaginary ball hitting a make-believe racket in a made-up game. What's real? Who knows? And what difference does it make?