In 1975, Jack Nicholson was still the handsome, laconic young man who had taken the film industry by storm. He had the successes of Five Easy Pieces (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Chinatown (1973), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) in his recent past, when he undertook another highly challenging role in The Passenger (originally released as Professione: Reporter), a film directed in Hollywood by the inimitable Italian master, Michelangelo Antonioni. It seemed an unlikely pairing and the product was lost on most of the American film audience, but it remains a film that will be forever treasured by those who value movies with a European sensibility.

Historical Background: Antonioni was born in 1912 in Ferrara, Italy. He was educated in business and economics, but began writing film criticism for a local newspaper and experimenting with film on his own time. He moved to Rome in 1939 and started writing for Cinema, which was the film magazine of the Fascist party. During the war, he got his first experience with the filmmaking process when he collaborated on scripts for two Rossellini films, in 1942. That same year, he also went to France to assist Marcel Carné with the French-Italian co-production that became the great Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942). He own first film as a director, the short documentary Gente del Po was begun in 1943, but it being the middle of World War II, he was unable to complete it until 1947. He was already 38 years of age when he made his first feature film, Story of a Love Affair, in 1950. Although that film showed some of the peculiarities of style that would become Antonioni hallmarks, it went largely unnoticed.

During the next ten years, Antonioni continued to develop as a filmmaker, while directing four feature films and collaborating with Fellini on the script for The White Sheik (1952). His international breakout film was L’Avventura (1960), which ultimately became the first film of a trilogy, that included La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962). In this trio of films, Antonioni established both the cinematic style and the thematic content for which he would become internationally acclaimed. His visual style consisted of long lingering shots designed to reveal the inner turmoil of his characters through their behaviors juxtaposed against barren or technologic backgrounds. Thematically, Antonioni focused on bleak issues of alienation and isolation in modern life, resulting from communication difficulties and loss of naturalism in human society. His narratives are typically obtuse, providing an air of mystery that invites active viewer involvement. Since relatively few viewers want to engage cinema in that way, the audience for Antonioni's work is relatively limited.

Antonioni continued his distinctive approach to visual composition with his first color film, Red Desert (1964). Antonioni then directed Blow-Up (1966), an U.K.-Italy co-production that became one of his most famous works and a staple of the art house circuit. Following that success, he was lured to Hollywood, where he made two films, neither commercially successful and one, Zabriskie Point (1970), a critical disaster as well. Although critical opinion in relation to Antonioni's other Hollywood film, The Passenger (1975), was and is mixed (Roger Ebert has very little good to say about it), many critics and film lovers count it among Antonioni's best work. While in Hollywood, Antonioni clung steadfastly to his artistic integrity, which largely guaranteed disinterest in the American mass market.

The Story: David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is an investigative television reporter on assignment in North Africa, where he hopes to interview a group of rebel fighters in a small country under the yoke of a corrupt government. He finds himself chasing ghosts and false leads through the Sahara desert, all the while chafing under the twin burdens of an unhappy marriage and a job from which he derives little satisfaction. When his jeep becomes stuck in the desert sands, he returns to his hotel worn and bedraggled. After freshening up a bit, he checks in on an Englishman in a neighboring room, David Robertson, whose acquaintance he had briefly made earlier. He discovers that the man has died abruptly and noting the similarity in the man's appearance to his own, impetuously decides to kiss his own dreary life and identity goodbye and assume that of the deceased man. He hauls the man into his own room, changes clothing and papers, switches passport photos, and reports the death (his own!) to the hotel desk. Just like that, David Locke becomes David Robertson, with a fresh lease on life.

David is in possession of Robertson's appointment book and sets out to take up the man's life where it had left off. It turns out, however, that Robertson's life is somewhat more exciting and involved than Locke's old life as a reporter. Robertson was a gunrunner, selling arms to the rebels. David finds himself juggling two sets of problems: (1) keeping up with the commitments and appointments made by Robertson and, (2) keeping out of reach of his old associates and his wife, Rachel (Jenny Runacre), who are trying to track down Robertson to learn more about Locke's supposed death. David is playing a risky game, as we are reminded when we observe the authorities beating and, later, executing one of the rebel operatives. Along the way, David enlists the aid of an attractive young French woman (Maria Schneider), to recover his belongings from his hotel room, which is being watched. She takes a shine to him and decides to tag along, for the adventure and a bit of romance. The film now proceeds as a kind of combination thriller and road film to its inevitable denouement.

Themes: The Passenger is a thematically rich film, much deeper, in fact, than just the alienation theme that is the bread-and-butter of Antonioni's oeuvre. One can count on one or more of the central characters in an Antonioni film suffering from existential angst, but the issues here are broader. Certainly, David is alienated and lonely, all the more so because he is trapped in a place where no one speaks his language and where the physical environment is dominated by an endless sweep of barren sands. We are not told all of the reasons for David's distress, but astute viewers can gather from flashbacks that his relationship with his wife is cool and remote. We also see in flashbacks to the newsreel footage of interviews he has conducted that he found little genuine value in his work. He experienced it as an essentially dishonest process. Those interviewed fed him information filtered according to their political agendas and his role as a reporter.

David imagines, as each of us might, that his sense of despair is the result of his circumstances in life and that he could break away from his sense of alienation if only he could start over again. His job as a reporter requires that he maintain distance and objectivity from issues and from the subjects of his interviews, which adds to his sense of detachment. He imagines that if he could change who he is, he could once again feel engaged with life and with humanity. Suddenly, the opportunity presents itself to do just that. When asked by his French girlfriend why he has abandoned his old identity, he tells her to turn around and look out the back of the convertible as they're cruising down the highway. She and we observe the past continuously receding into infinity. In one of the film's great shots, she smiles and understands.

David has swapped identities, but the identity he has assumed is that of a man who was much more engaged in life than David had been. Robertson, we learn, was committed to the rebels' cause, not merely in the gunrunning business to make a quick buck. David has gone from passive observer (which contributes to alienation) to active participant (which comes with an inherent element of danger). Changing identities is no answer to alienation, however, and when you gamble on stealing another man's identity, there's likely to be a price. The tension of the film comes from the fact that we know better than David that his experiment can come to no good end. As in so many road films, the protagonist ends up blowing it all on one last glorious opportunity to feel vibrantly alive.

Production Values: Antonioni makes films for viewers who like their stories mysterious and subtle. Instead of laying out a straightforward narrative, Antonioni leaves much to be worked out by viewers, from innuendo and inference. The principle at work here is that less is more. The story is essentially an existential one, about such issues as the meaning of life and identity, involvement versus observation, and about alienation and companionship. The particulars of the story are merely incidental. We are never told directly, for example, why David is so much in despair of his life that he is prepared to take the precipitous gamble that Robertson's life will be more appealing. Instead, the seeds of David's despair are hinted at through his demeanor and through the flashbacks that illustrate his work as a reporter.

It is Jack Nicholson's performance that ultimately raises this film to the caliber of greatness. This is the still youthful Nicholson, contemporaneous with his great performances in Chinatown (74) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (75), not the flabby, middle-aged actor who played so many horny, dirty old men, albeit effectively. In my opinion, this ranks as one of Nicholson's greatest performances for the simple reason that the role requires great subtlety. This is a character that cannot be overtly revealed precisely because he is a man who has thrown away his identity. He no longer wants to be who he has been before. Nicholson made his mark during the sixties and seventies as one of the great film presences, but here his job is to play a man who wants to be absent. Nicholson has to show us his character's anxieties and despair through his demeanor, sardonic gestures, and expressions of weariness, with very little of the patented Nicholson flamboyant intensity. The minimalism imposed by Antonioni with respect to plot and mise-en-scene channels the viewer's attention directly onto Nicholson's performance. How does a world-class actor carry a film playing a character that is a nonentity? Nicholson shows you how in this film. Nobody expresses seen-it-all, world-weariness better than Nicholson. Looking back, this role must strike Nicholson as ironic to the extent that he later, in his real life, became enormously burdened by the weight of his own public identity.

So, much of the film's meaning is conveyed by Nicholson's restrained but expressive performance and much of the rest by Antonioni's command of visual spaces and images. David's alienation is partly inherent in the desolate terrains and isolated, barren rooms that he occupies. More than any other director, Antonioni makes his films about the relationship between figure and ground – his characters juxtaposed against the exotic and forlorn environments that he chooses.

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The final, shattering scene in this film is rightfully famous in its own right. It is both technically intriguing and artistically perfect. The film reaches it's decisive resolution during a ten-minute unbroken shot that begins in a room in a broken down hotel near Cairo, where David has gone to keep one last appointment in Robertson's date book. The shot begins with David opening the shutters on the iron-barred picture window. We watch him lie down on his bed for a nap, then the camera pans back to the window and we watch cars and people coming and going for several minutes. After a bit of this, the camera zooms in on the courtyard outside and glides effortlessly outward, somehow passing through the iron bars unimpeded. Outside, the camera pans a bit more around the exterior, so that we know it is no longer inside the hotel room. That much is the technical wonder of the shot. At the same time, what this extended shot is conveying is the arrival of the agents of the corrupt government, the ones we had earlier seen beat and execute one of the rebels. We see David's French girlfriend pacing nervously. We hear a single shot – off-camera – and the car of the government agents drive away. Soon, a police car drives up and one of the passengers in the vehicle is David's wife, Rachel, having finally tracked him down and hoping to warn him of the danger that he is in. The French girl and Rachel race into the room at the same moment. David's two identities have suddenly converged – but he's dead!

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Maria Schneider has a more straightforward role, in this film, but makes the most of it. She's there to complement Nicholson's rough edges with her soft and sensual beauty. She's there, as well, to provide outlet for some much-needed expository dialog. Schneider is best known for her role opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (1972) and later appeared in Savage Nights (1993). In contrast to Last Tango in Paris, here the romantic and sexual bonding is given absolutely minimal attention – just one quick shot from outside the hotel window of Schneider and Nicholson lying side by side in the buff, face down.

Bottom-Line: The American Academy gave Antonioni an honorary Oscar in 1995 for his extraordinary career and, fittingly, it was Nicholson that they asked to present the statue. Nicholson won one of his own Oscar's in 1975 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but his performance the same year in The Passenger was every bit as good or better. This film is in English, but it will nevertheless be most appreciated by those with a taste for European-style cinema and for fans of Nicholson. This is one of his best performances. The running time is 123 minutes and the film is rated PG.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older