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Originally Posted by atsonicpark
Very true... I think Antonioni usually does have a bit of light in his films, but some of them end on a very sour note. I always thought BLOW-UP ended on a very strange and somewhat bleak note -- very unsettling, especially for the time period, and was always interested in why that film was so damn popular (don't get me wrong, I love it, it's one of the best films ever, but it doesn't seem like the kind of movie most audiences would want to watch over and over again, despite being a mainstream success).
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Yeah, I've always seen the ending of Blow Up as being very bleak. I remember GMKU writing a good interpretation of it a while back but I can't recall what it was. But yeah, Blow Up is the one I probably like the least. Antonioni seemed to have trouble grafting the style and ideas he'd developed in Italy onto films he made outside. They become merely clever. It's similar to what happened to Tarkovsky when he started making films in Sweden and Italy.
Regarding Blow Up's commercfial success, i know a few people who were part of the 'scene' that Antonioni was trying to capture and they were less than impressed with the result. The general word seems to be that Antonioni's London was very much an outsider's 'idea' of what was going on, compared with Performance, which many of the same people feel was a far 'truer' more authentic account. Not that Antonioni was ever interested in giving an authentic account of mid 60s London to begin with.