So this is a movie by Michelangelo Antonioni, who you will recall from such movies as L’avventura and L’eclisse, both of which are artsy Italian movies that set up a plot only to basically abandon it.

But that’s not quite what this movie is, because this movie — still made in the 1960s, but later on (1966) — is set in London. And specifically, the “Swinging London” of Austin Powers, because its protagonist is a decadent fashion photographer, and he drives around a convertible and shags women who he photographs in and out of very sixties fashions.

For some reason, this was Antonioni’s big commercial movie — maybe because it’s in color? or in English? — and apparently it was famous among cinemagoers of the time because it shows pubic hair, which, uh, okay, it’s good to be famous for something, I guess. (But also, this is a movie whose attitude to sex is pretty yikes about consent. It’s very much that “no, no, no… YES YES YES” model that would get this guy arrested if he tried that today.)

But also it was seen as a movie that retained his artsy virtues while being more approachable than his earlier films. I can understand that, but my take is actually exactly the opposite: I think it retains the flaws of his earlier films (in particular, his strong allergy to story), but is much less interesting in abandoning ennui-laden black-and-white Italian decadence for ennui-laden Technicolor British decadence.

So let’s talk about the story. I’m going to be spoilery here, if you care. (But ps if you do care, do not read the HBO Max description of this film, and click through to start it while averting your eyes from the screen.)

So, the HBO Max one-line description is, “A photographer discovers a murder in the background of a candid photo,” which is accurate as a description of the main narrative, but also literally is the plot. Like, he doesn’t know that he’s seen a murder until 3/4 of the way through the movie, and the real narrative core of the movie is the part where he’s in his darkroom developing and enlarging his photograph. This draws out the tension of what he’s seeing — tension totally removed by reading that one-line description — as well as being a kind of interesting process. It’s fascinating to see this done via absurd mechanical processes from the days before “zoom in and enhance” was a thing.

With that description in mind, I was expecting this to be a Hitchcockian thing where the dude witnesses a murder, and then has to deal with danger, and wondering whether it’s real or not. But while there is a little bit of that (as his place is broken into and the photos stolen), most of this movie happens before we even know that a murder happened, and it comes off as really weird pacing. And of course, Antonioni being who he is, we never do figure out what actually happened, and the resolution of the “was a guy murdered?” story is “who knows, probably, idk.”

No lie, the actual ending of the story is that a carful of mimes (who we previously saw driving around and stopping people in an opening shot — I had no idea what was happening there, but as Roger Ebert notes in his review, “a British audience would have known they were participating in the ritual known as ‘rag,’ in which students dress up and roar around town raising money for charity,” so now you know) stop and play a game of tennis, and the photographer gets drawn in and has to throw an invisible ball back to them when it gets hit out of the court, the end.

So to me, seeing this in relationship to Antonioni’s earlier movies, it seems pretty clearly to be the beginning of a decadent late-period Antonioni, where his playful experiments have calcified into a one-note “style,” and the limits of his early talent have been fully mapped out. But apparently many critics saw this as a refreshing new direction for him, and were then disappointed when his next movies showed him to be in his decadent, calcified late period. I think I’m going to chalk this one up to time giving a better perspective than the enthusiasms of the moment, and give the point to me. (And sorta to Pauline Kael, who hated this movie, but whose explanation of why is at least somewhat tied to twencen culture war stuff that hasn’t been relevant for many years now.)