Enlargement

One of the movies that I probably would have used in the "Blind Spot" blogathon series if I ever took part in it would have been Blow-Up. Not too long ago, I finally watched it in order to do a post on it here.

Blow-Up, like yesterday's selection of Two Girls and a Sailor, is a bit difficult to do a review on, but for a different reason. With yesterday's movie, it was a movie with a thin plot wrapped around a bunch of musical acts; in the case of Blow-Up it's a thin plot wrapped around visuals of 1960s London. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a fashion photographer in London who takes lots of pictures of clothes models, both women who are already models and women who would like to become models.

One day, bored with all that, he goes to one of London's lesser-known parks, or at least, someplace I'd never heard of that doesn't look all that big. There, he takes photos of young Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), and her older lover, whom she apparently doesn't want to be seen in public with, or at least not have their photo taken together. So Jane comes back to Thomas' studio to try to get the film. This gives Thomas the idea that there must be something more to the photos that Jane is worried about, since she looks worried about more than just being with her lover.

Thomas enlarges the pictures to such a ridiculous extent that everything ought to be just a blur, and finds one of the blurs looking like it could be a murder victim. Now, the park where he was taking those photos must not be very popular, because he goes out later that evening to the park, thinking he'll find more evidence. Surely if anything happened somebody else would have seen it.

In and among all this, we get scenes of Thomas doing things in the more swinging London, such as taking pictures of models in outfits that look really dated now, and going to a party where everybody is taking drugs. The next morning, Thomas winds up with a bunch of mimes, because large groups of mimes go to parks just to screw with normal people's minds.

Blow-Up is a movie that has a lot of images that look nice on film, but a plot that will probably frustrate a lot of people. The movie placing more of an emphasis on visuals than plot also means that it has a fairly languid pace, which will also definitely be a minus to some people. Indeed, Blow-Up is a movie that's decidedly not going to be to some people's tastes. While I didn't hate it, I didn't exactly love it, either. It's the sort of movie where I can say I'm glad I finally got it off my blind spot list, but not one that I'm going to go out of my way to watch again.