Blow-Up

Blow-Up.  It’s a classic, an Antonioni about a man trapped in a listless existence that must’ve seemed cool when he chose to get into it; a man who comes fully, completely alive when he photographs the wrong people at the wrong time and, with his keen eye, sees something he should not have seen.

Look, we’re talking about Antonioni here, so the composition’s phenomenal and the story works.  But that’s not what interested me in viewing Blow-Up.  In a film about a photographer and the photographer’s eye, I found the soundscapes most interesting. 

Blow-Up doesn’t feature a music-as-wallpaper soundscape.  Rather, it opts for ambient noise.  For long stretches, this translates to almost no noise at all, as much of the action takes place inside the photographer’s head.  He thinks, he works, he plays, he thinks some more, and we don’t need symphonic strings to keep us occupies as he’s about it.  There’s enough there for us in the film’s compelling questions: did he see what he thought he saw?  Does it matter?  What does it mean, and what does it mean in the context of his life as we’ve seen it thus far?

Blow-Up trusts itself, its story, and craftsmanship enough to refrain from overwhelming us.  It trusts its audience to keep up, even when there may not appear to be all that much with which to keep up.  It thinks, and works, it plays, it thinks some more, and it expects us to do so, as well.

But does it work?  Well, yes.  Blow-Up pulls us into its world and wraps us up in its central mystery, all while giving the eye plenty to enjoy and the mind plenty to chew.  This Antonioni guy – I think he knew what he was about.

L'Eclisse

I hated L'ECLISSE.

The film begins in the drawing room of Monica Vitti and Francisco Rabal. They're exhausted, both emotionally and physically. She's leaving him, things could get ugly, but they never do. That would be too dramatic. Instead, they end up simply going their separate ways, and the film follows Vitti over the next several days.

Unfortunately, Vitti is neither particularly interesting nor particularly pleasant to look at. She feels disaffected, she walks here and there, she falls into an unengaging relationship with Alain Delon; none of which happen with much passion (I know a film romance is in trouble when a doorbell rings and I think, "Maybe somebody will come in and shoot them. That'd add some drama."). Finally, the film ends with something I interpreted as a big "f you" to the audience: minutes and minutes of dull, empty cityscape. No drama. No story. Just images. F you, Antonioni. If I want images, I'll go to an art museum. Tell me a story.

I do respect that Antonioni is trying to do something here. Mine is not ire at poor craftsmanship or lazy filmmaking. L'ECLISSE certainly does not aspire to the mediocrity of, say, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake, which I'm having trouble mustering the energy to write about. My problem is that Antonioni disregards the first law of narrative film: engage and entertain your audience. L'ECLISSE is two hours of people I don't care about doing things I don't care about for reasons I don't care about. I'm glad it's over.

Eros

Wong Kar Wai. Steven Soderbergh. Michelangelo Antonioni. Three short films on Eros. How could it possibly go wrong?

Wrong it goes.

Here's the problem: the first film, Wong Kar Wai's "The Hand," is so much better than the other two that most of the movie is a letdown. In "The Hand," Gong Li plays an aging courtesan who enthralls and possesses the young tailor (Chang Chen, from THREE TIMES) sent to design and create her gowns. Li is so intriguing, so commanding, so sad, so pathetic, that she overshadows every other woman in the tryptich. When we should be thinking about the Dream Girl of Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" or the dancing nudes of Antonioni's "The Dangerous Thread of Things," we're thinking about Li and Chen and Christopher Doyle's beautiful cinematography.

Unfortunately, this means that EROS is a mixed bag. TiVo it for the first chapter, but feel free to skip the following two.