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Originally Posted by Murmer99
The mimed tennis game at the end is perhaps the most powerful ending I've seen and nearly made me want to cry... despite not even knowing what the scene meant.
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It's obviously open to endless interpretation but the best or most convincing one that I've heard is that by picking up the invisible ball, he's finally succumbed to the absurdity of the era. Although he was arguably as much a part of it from the word go.
To be honest, the anti-Blow Up thing (if we can call it that) seems more a British thing, just as most people I've met who don't like Zabriskie Point (which I really like) are American. There's a sense that outside Italy, Antonioni was a bit too much of a tourist, not really getting the details right and a bit in awe of it all. I actually know a couple of people who had minor parts in Blow Up, mostly in the party scene, and they weren't that convinced that Antonioni really 'got' the world they represented at all. General consensus is that Performance was a far more accurate and insightful portrayal of the whole Swinging London thing. I'm too young to really comment but certainly Performance
feels more in tune with that time than Blow Up does - perhaps because Donald Cammell, Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, etc were very much a part of that scene. And maybe Antonioni's style just wasn't really suited to the subject-matter. Given what he did in films like Roma, Satyricon and obviously La Dolce Vita, perhaps Fellini would've been a better choice to direct it.