deception
by Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (screenplay,
English dialogue by Edward Bond, suggested by the story by Julio Cortázar),
Michelangelo Antonioni (director) Blow-Up / 1966
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up begins
with an image of deception. Released from either prison or a flophouse (several
reviewers have suggested the latter), Thomas, along with other denizens of the
place, moves slowly through the gate. The skuzzy young man—whose face, somewhat
like Pound’s metro image of “petals on a wet, black bough,” stands out (he is
played after all by the photogenic actor David Hemmings) against the gauntly
determined faces of the others—carries a small paper sack like a treasure,
keeping his distance from his fellow inmates, seemingly resisting their
friendly (we hear none of their conversation) advances. The moment they have
walked away, Thomas turns and walks in the other direction, settling into a
convertible and throwing the bag, containing what we now perceive as an
expensive camera, into the back seat. If we haven’t guessed, we might at least
suspect something is not as it seems—and, indeed, we later discover that the
central figure of this film has been on a secretive “shoot,” snapping shots of
the men inside the institution for a book of photographs he is planning to
publish with the help of his friend, Ron (Peter Bowles).
Immediately after, we are presented with a carload of screaming mimes,
what should be a contradiction in terms, out on what appears to be an obnoxious
early morning joyride (I once quipped that all mimes should be shot at birth),
but is actually a “rag,” a raucous mod-60s way of raising money for charity.
Thomas returns to his studio/home, ready to shoot the “birds,” dressed
in the newest mod fashions, over whom he hovers while caressing and kissing
each in order to get them to “perform,” while also alternately berating and
verbally abusing them. Such evidently is the lot of a fashion model, for
despite all the abuse, the women wait patiently between his frequent absences,
while new would-be models stand at his door hoping to gain his admittance.
A
quick visit to his artist friend Bill next door reveals similar issues of
deception and self-delusion. Bill clearly is deluding himself about his
relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), as we
perceive through her and Thomas’s intense glances, a relationship that later is
more clearly revealed in her quick visit to her neighbor, Hemming’s character,
after having sex with Bill. The artist also iterates what will be a major theme
of Antonioni’s work: that his art often seems empty until he can extract an
image or idea from it. In other words, what seems to be empty may come to have
great meaning if looked at long enough or from various perspectives.
According to Ronan O’Casey, who played the mysterious lover of Jane
(Vanessa Redgrave) and the later corpse of the film, a reporter from the German
magazine, Der Spiegel, “kept saying,” during an interview with him, “But
this movie makes no sense—no narrative thread, no plot line!” A number of
critics expressed confusion over whether or not there had really been a murder
and a corpse.
O’Casey accounts for the confusion by reporting that, after vast
over-expenditures, producer Carlo Ponti (who died on January 9th of that year)
appeared on the set, closing down further shooting, and that Antonioni was left
with no choice but to piece together the fragments he had already filmed. O’Casey
recalls:
“The intended story was as follows: the young
lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa and me to Maryon Park in
London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival. I pick up Vanessa
in a nice new dark green Jaguar and drive through London—giving Antonioni a
chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant,
the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s
watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film. We then saunter hand in
hand into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of
the park. Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances
at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the
two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans go awry when he notices
Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns
out, he has.”
In a
luncheon meeting with O’Casey—whom his friends know as Case—I pointed out that
the original story upon which this film is based is far more disjunctive and
disorienting. In Julio Cortázar’s masterful tale—which, according to the
credits, “suggested” Antonioni’s work—the photographer comes upon a woman and a
young boy (15 years of age) apparently engaged in a romantic tryst. He imagines
the boy’s excitement and fear as the older woman toys with him, entertaining
possible endings of the story: the boy may join the woman for sex, the boy may
get cold feet and run, etc. But suddenly he notices something else: a man
waiting in a car nearby. His camera catches the movement of the man toward the
couple, and he suddenly recognizes the horror of what he has witnessed: that
the man himself is involved in the affair, that he has perhaps used the woman
as a decoy, has, at the very least, been the cause of her flirtation. What lies
ahead for the boy is not an innocent “first love,” but that “the real boss was
waiting there, smiling petulantly, already certain of his business; he was not
the first to send a woman in the vanguard, to bring him the prisoners manacled
with flowers. The rest of it would be so simple, the car, some house or
another, drinks, stimulating engravings, tardy tears, the awakening in hell.”
When the man spies the photographer, the boy escapes, the man responding,
perhaps, by shooting the boy (or woman): “…the man was directly center, his
mouth half open, you could see a shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands
slowly, bringing them into the foreground, an instant still in perfect focus,
and then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree, and I shut my
eyes, I didn’t want to see any more, and I covered my face and broke into tears
like an idiot.”
Cortázar’s story is not so much about deception—although the couple
certainly attempts to deceive the boy—as it is about misperception, the
impossibility of ever understanding the whole of any story, and the dangers of
believing what one thinks he has perceived. In a sense, I suggested, we should
be thankful to Ponti that Antonioni was unable to bring his film to even
greater coherency, for then it might have lost any relationship to its
purported source.
But
in retrospect it becomes fascinating now to perceive that, in a grand manner,
Antonioni has created another level of deception in transforming a story about
a pedophile attempting to engage in sexual contact with a boy into a story that
is fully grounded in heterosexual normativity, the kind of the world which
O’Casey described in the original scenario. Anyone who might have been drawn to
the film from reading Cortázar’s original story, as I had, has also been fully
deceived.
In
Antonioni’s work, moreover, the photographer sees nothing, a fact he repeats
several times throughout the film. Neither does he proffer any imaginative
observations. He merely observes a couple in the park, a woman and an older
man, who kiss and hold hands. It is the woman’s demand for his film that
arouses any curiosity he might have. The later appearance of a strange,
fair-haired man following him—even though we may not know who it is (Case sites
it as an example of the illogical film clips with which Antonioni was
left)—further hints that something is amiss; like Thomas, we instinctively
sense he has something to do with the woman, reiterated in the action of Thomas
checking the lock on his glove compartment upon returning to his car. When Jane
actually appears at his door, we understand that she is not, like the other
women in Thomas’s life, hoping to model, to get herself on film—although she
tries to deceive him by letting him believe she seeks such a career or is
offering him sex—as she is interested in getting herself off film by destroying
the images he has taken. To Thomas’s first statement to her in the park, “Don’t
let’s spoil everything, we’ve only met,” Jane responds, “No, we haven’t met.
You’ve never met me.”
Accordingly, Thomas recognizes her deceptions, greeting her at the door
as she attempts to escape with his camera; he, in turn, deceiving her by
pretending to return the roll of film while keeping the actual canister.
Soon
after, the two young girls, who have earlier stalked him in hopes of a career,
return, also willing (but reticent) to have sex in exchange for a “shoot.”
Thomas also deceives them in a hilarious satire of an orgy, the group wrestling
about in, significantly, purple (the color associated with exaggerated literary
effects and turn-of-the century sexual tales) paper like three young puppies
rather than lustful adults. Indeed, Thomas is basically an observer as the two
girls engage in a kind of lesbian wrestling match, only at the last moment
becoming involved as he attempts to strip the last few clothes off of them as
they try to undress him. There is no sex. And the minute they has finished
their play, he orders them out.
Like his artist friend, the photographer attempts to extract meaning
from his series of purposeless acts. What we and he at first see is nearly the
opposite of what Bill does in his art. Bill’s art is made of thousands of dots
of color, from which he ultimately extracts an image. Thomas’s work is
outwardly a complete image, a representation of the reality he has seen in the
park. But as he grows curious about the glance of the woman in the image and
the sequence of the events he has witnessed—as he begins to enlarge those
images—we are reminded that photographs are also made up of a series a dots;
and the more frequently he enlarges those images the more apparent it becomes
that they are not “real” at all but rather a series of dots imitating reality,
things of art.
What he and we discover in those increasingly hard-to-read, blurred, and
dotted artifacts is the occurrence of a real and horrible act; the seemingly
innocent love between Jane and the older man was in “reality” a setup, the
murderer waiting in the bushes with a gun. A late-night trip back to the park
awakens the young man to a new reality: a corpse lies in the dark. Who to tell?
How does one speak the truth to a society whose reality is itself blurred by
deceit?
By
the time he has returned home, his studio has been looted, all but one of the
photographs taken. Attempting to report the events to his friend, he
accidentally comes upon Jane in the street, but she disappears as quickly as he
has spotted her. He discovers his friend at a party where nearly everyone is
drugged, quite literally “out of their minds.” The model who has told him she
is on her way to Paris answers his quip, “I thought you were supposed to be in
Paris,” with a statement that exposes the extreme level of self-deception these
people have achieved: “I am in Paris!”
The next morning the corpse is also missing. Thomas no longer has
anything left to prove what he has seen, and can only wonder whether he too has
not been deceived. Antonioni ends his film with an inevitable, Fellini-like
image of a world where nothing but deception is allowed. The car of mimes
reappears, entering the park. There the white-faced pretenders take their
positions upon the tennis court, playing, in every sense of that word, a game,
Thomas watching in bemused silence. Hitting the invisible ball over the fence,
they wait for Thomas to throw it back. He pauses, considering perhaps to what
level he needs to participate in this world of deceptions, finally joining the
pack, picking it up and tossing it back. Just as suddenly, he also disappears.
In such a world of deception we are
forced to question nearly everything about our hero, including why he was at
the murder site, if there was a murder, and what it is he believes he has
discovered and even his own objectivity, his sexuality, and, just perhaps, his
very existence. What we see in this film is not necessarily to be believed.
In my reading of the film Antonioni has
created a clearly narrative, quite coherent work about a world that survives on
its own pretense, a world that depends upon everyone being deceived. Like the
innocent boy of the original Cortázar tale, we may be lured into a trap which
we will finally regret. And, in that fact, Blow-Up presents a world,
which like a gigantically expanded balloon, should be prepared for precisely
what its title suggests, a great bang, an explosion of the air upon which it
lives.
Los Angeles, August 21, 2007
Reprinted from Nth Position [England],
(October 2007) and in Sibila [Brazil], 2012.
