It's a great film (probably my favorite Coppola) and expands on Blow Up in a more cohesive fashion. However, if you want the similar concept of a person realizing they're recorded a murder, I'd recommend The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola. What does it say about Thomas that he is so easily distracted from his investigation? Why does he go through all of this work and effort, only to let it slip through his fingers? How can an artist who has tasted this focus, this passion, this nirvana, just toss it away? I can't say. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. Whether there was a murder isn't the point. Roger Ebert describes Thomas' core conflict quite nicely: The conspiracy is more a tool to analyze Thomas, and understand why he has lost his artistic passion. Likewise, Blow Up is intriguing from the perspective of a murder mystery or a conspiracy film in which the conspiracy is irrelevant. I don't want to spoil L'Avventura if you haven't seen it, but basically the way the characters act, and how their actions make the death irrelevant reflect their inner selves in an utterly fascinating manner. I could almost imagine Antonioni trying to think of the least interesting, least worth pursuing death and just coming up with "fuck it, she disappears" (there's a valid suicide interpretation but imo it's irrelevant either way). L'Avventura was interesting from the perspective of writing a film about a death, in which the death is the least important part–almost irrelevant. I find Antonioni films rather fascinating from a narrative construction perspective. The ending scene with the mimes and Thomas disappearing is almost like Antonioni thumbing his nose at the audience, reminding us that all of this is made up and meaningless. ![]() And to have a film that so willingly embraces ambiguity and mystery. Perhaps it's because I had only seen films with such an inevitable narrative thread–a thread that pushes the character regardless of their decisions–that it felt refreshing to have a film without that thread. I don't know why, but it felt just so fresh and different. ![]() I loved Blow Up from the first time I saw it. I'm curious, did you see it in theaters? Antonioni films can be a little slow and I tend to like slow films in theaters more than at home.
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