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The "artistic temperament" splayed wide open as ferocious symphony, crimson curtains and all. A crucial little scene early on states Dario Argento's rejection of formalism (a jazz session criticized as "too clean, too precise"), the doomed psychic (Macha Méril) gives incantatory voice to his imagistic approach ("Thoughts linger about the room like cobwebs..."). The setup (out of Dr. Mabuse der Spieler and The 39 Steps) puts mind-reader and killer in the same auditorium, she's pierced first telepathically and then physically, the British pianist (David Hemmings) witnesses the slaughter and sets out to investigate. The dissolute colleague (Gabriele Lavia), the retired diva (Clara Calamai) and the brassy reporter (Daria Nicolodi) take turns confounding him, even the redheaded moppet (Nicoletta Elmi) grins like a goblin when not toying with pins and reptiles. The prowling camera points to "the house of the screaming child," where the obsessed musician chips away at the plaster until a rotting corpse is revealed (Dalí's Rainy Taxi). "What you actually see and what you imagine," sorted out at the junction between paintings and mirrors. Beauty and horror, Argento's braided elements: Disorientating tracking shots slowly revealed as bedeviled perspectives, macabre objects that in extreme close-up go from talismanic to architectural, opulent tableaux that grow more gorgeous once split by a hatchet. Faces are blistered and teeth are demolished, though it's the eye that's confronted most assiduously in this bottomless analysis of Blowup, where gaze and memory are as slippery as the clues that literally evaporate from moment to moment. The child's gory drawing and the lullaby leitmotif, the puncturing of masculine control by dainty transvestite and arm-wrestling bout and scalding coffee steam to the ass (cp. Hawks' Scarface). The sanguinary manifestations of the inquisitive psyche, De Palma takes it from there in Blow Out. With Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandra, Piero Mazzinghi, and Glauco Mauri.
--- Fernando F. Croce |