stededalus

"Blow-up" is probably the most interesting Antonioni's film together with "L'avventura", sharing with it the structure of an atypical detective story: it starts with the hint of a murder end ends with a giant question mark, while the solution of the case turns out to be as uncertain as the case itself. And what's important in this film , as a matter of the fact, is not at all who killed whom or why he did it, but the impossibility to discover it, to capture the essence of something that's buried in the past from the very moment after it happened.

"Blow-up" is not a movie, not completely anyway; it is cinema wondering about itself, inquiring about the illusory, fleeting nature of its matter, underlining the limits of every single fragment of reality it recreates. It's a treatise, indeed.

Marco Bellocchio directs his first full-length film, and it's already a masterpiece, a milestone in the history of Italian cinema.This movie is all about contemporary uneasiness and family crisis in today's society (only, some two decades in advance). Every time I hear of family massacres on the news, I've got to think about problematic, disturbed Lou Castel deciding to get rid of his mother and younger brother for the benefit of the eldest, embodying not only a stage of criminality, but above all a wrong philosophy, a twisted point of view about life, a failed maturity. Ennio Morricone' score is just perfect, fully successful in his aim to highlight the dramatic potential of the story. Lou Castel has never acted like this, his grimacing and his usage of the dead moments are unforgettable. The frames of the mother's death are like an howl, they "send shivers down your spine". A must-see.