Blow-Up movie review & film summary (1966)

Thomas wanders into a park and sees, at a distance, a man and a woman. Are they struggling? Playing? Flirting? He snaps a lot of photos. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) runs after him. She desperately wants the film back. He refuses her. She tracks him to his studio, takes off her shirt, wants to seduce him and steal the film. He sends her away with the wrong roll. Then he blows up his photos, and in the film's brilliantly edited centerpiece, he discovers that he may have photographed a murder.

Antonioni cuts back and forth between the photos and the photographer--using closer shots and larger blowups, until we see arrangements of light and shadow, dots and blurs, that may show--what? He is interrupted by two girls who have been pestering him all day, and engages in wild sex play as they roll around in crumpled backdrop paper. Then his eyes return to his blowups, he curtly sends them away, he makes more prints, and in the grainy, almost abstract blowups it appears that the woman is looking toward some bushes, there is a gunman there, and perhaps in one photo we see the man lying on the ground. Perhaps not.

Thomas returns to the park, and does actually see the man lying dead on the ground. Curiously, many writers say the photographer is not sure if he sees a body, but he is. What's unclear is whether he witnessed a murder. The audience understandably shares his interpretation of the photos, but another scenario is plausible: Redgrave wanted the photos because she was having an adulterous affair, her gray-haired lover dropped dead, she fled the park in a panic, and his body by the next morning had simply been discovered and removed. (The possibility of a scandalous affair plays off the Profumo scandal, in which a cabinet minister was linked to a call girl; the analysis of the photographs recalls the obsession with the Zapruder film.)

Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process; he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. He is happy.

Later, all his gains are taken back. The body and the photographs disappear. So does Redgrave. (There is an uncanny scene where he sees her standing outside a club, and then she turns and takes a few steps and simply disappears into thin air. At Virginia, we ran the sequence a frame at a time and could not discover the method of her disappearance; presumably she steps into a doorway, but we watched her legs, and they seemed somehow to attach themselves to another body.)

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