Michelangelo Antoninoi's Blow-Up is a fascinating hybrid of a film. An arthouse core wrapped in a thin  mainstream shell, it's easy to see how its nudity, sex and drug use would have been shocking for the time. How shocking is demonstrated by MGM releasing the film through a subsidiary that wouldn't have to abide by the MPAA Production Code (a foreshadowing of studios like Disney creating new labels to release adult fare--such as the PG, yes PG, Splash).

At the center of Blow-up (actually titled Blowup in the film's a head of its time credit sequence) is a fashion and art photographer, played by David Hemmings who's at the top of his game. Women are constantly circling his orbit to be photographed and he's working on a new collection of photos for a book.

Out of boredom, or maybe just plain lack of focus, he abruptly walks out the middle of a shoot, leaving his models to stand foolishly around with their eyes closed. After diverting himself with an antique shop he's interested in buying, Hemmings' photog heads to a park to capture the last set of images he needs for his book. While there he follows and photographs what he believes are two lovers enjoying a playful walk in the park.

After one of the lovers, Vanessa Redgrave, begs and pleads for the negatives, going so far to follow him home in an attempt to exchange sex for the negatives, Hemmings's realizes that there's probably more to the photos than mere infidelity. 

Over the course of the film he continues to blowup and order the pics in an attempt to create a narrative that pieces together what he captured. Did he film a murder or a murder attempt? Because he's seeing events only by manipulating his own pictures, is he manipulating the narrative into something of his own choosing? What emerges is a story about a man who's job is all about capturing his own point of view of the world and being rewarded for that point of view, yet is blind to the world just on the other side of his lens. Only finally understanding what he's captured long after the moment of the picture's initial creation. It's strongly hinted that until this incident, for all his talent and skill, this maybe the first time Hemming's photographer was really forced to look at his own work and reevaluate what he's captured. 

After watching the film twice over the last week, what I found much more shocking, than the sex and drug use--this is 2009 after all--was the disdain David Hemmings character had for the women in the film. Hemmings' photographer doesn't wear his dislike for the opposite sex lightly, it's evident from the get go. It's even all the more disturbing because he's clearly, at least sexually, attracted to the women he treats like mere objects. In some scenes, Antoninoi isn't afraid of riding that line between sex and violence. It's telling of where we were as a society when audiences of the 1960s noticed the nudity in the sequence with the two teenage girls, yet seemed to be blind to how Hemmings is treating them.

Coincidentally, Alfie with Michael Caine was released the same year. While Blow-up is pointedly more about perception than misogyny, both films strongly share a misogynistic theme. Juxtaposed against the swinging 60s of London, these films seem to predate the inevitable questioning of, and even backlash against, that decade's sexual freedom. Although, I'm not sure it's so much the sexual freedom of the 60s itself that's really the target, than the callousness and emptiness that thrived in that environment that's the real aim.

The misogyny theme does dovetail nicely into the photographer's journey of perception and self awareness. Walking in on his best friend and the best friend's wife making love, Hemming's photographer for the first time acknowledges, or recognizes, the attraction the wife has for him and possibly vice versa. The way he bolts from the house leads one to believe that for the first time, he's felt a genuine emotion for a woman and it shames him, scares him or both. A set of feelings that are also seemingly drawn out with his reactions to the park photos.

Things that jumped out at me, observations and other strange notions:

• Notice the number of times people are shot through windows and are seen in reflections. Note that some characters are even introduced in reflection first. This is very much a visual reminder that this is a story about someone who sees the world through a lens.
• Lots of characters bisected by lines, horizontal and diaganol. (Admittedly, not sure the significance till I listned to the commentary about Antoninoi's repeated use of that motif. Must watch more of his films, I must.)
• Lack of names. Very few if any of the characters, including Hemmings' photographer have names.
• Hemmings' photographer is visibly more abusive whenever he's dealing with more than one woman at a time. One on one, he's a much "softer" character. He's still cruel, controlling and dismissive, but it becomes much more subtle--and frankly scary. It reinforces the commentary on the swinging 60s.
• Hemmings' photographer has his hand bitten twice by women in the film. Once by Redgrave when she tries to get the camera from him when he won't willingly give her the negatives. And once by one of the teenage girls. Both times, Hemmings is using his power to control both the situation and to deny the women something they want.
• The mimes at the beginning and the end have probably started just as many arguments as the is it "alone" or "a loan" in the Temptation's Papa Was a Rollin' Stone.