He finds himself in a park, where the breeze sounds in the tops of the trees like the sea at low tide. The photographer, fed up with the birds and the mod fashion shoots, goes off in search of fresh air – and fresh mischief. An oblique and maddening one, for sure, but a story nonetheless. There is a reason Antonioni has made the protagonist a photographer – a man who looks but doesn’t see – just as there was for replacing his original actor, Terence Stamp, with the relatively unknown David Hemmings.īut the film has something else Antonioni had never deigned to include before: a story. It marked a departure from director Michelangelo Antonioni’s previous studies in alienation, most notably La Notte, in which Jeanne Moreau wanders lonely about the streets of Milan while the beautiful people party on in listless defiance of boredom.īlow-Up, his first English-language production, dives head-first into swinging London, seen from behind the wheel of a dandy photographer’s Rolls convertible – already, younger readers will be thinking of Austin Powers – as he bounces from slumming in a dosshouse to cavorting with dolly birds and models in his studio. Appropriately for a picture about perception and ambiguity, it plays very differently from the one I remember first seeing years ago – I could have sworn it was in black and white, for a start. The film was Blow-Up, and 50 years after its UK release it reverberates way beyond the notoriety of Jane Birkin showing her bits on screen.
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