Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"The Passenger"+ (1975) is a much better title for the last masterpiece of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) than the Italian one: "Professione: reporter," because the film's protagonist, played by Jack Nicholson, casts aside his previous profession, and, indeed his identity when another (seemingly the only other) guest in a hotel at the edge of the Sahara Desert (Mali) has a fatal heart attack. David Locke (Nicholson) switches passport photos, takes Mr. Robertson's datebook, plane tickets, and pistol, and leaves behind his camera, tape recorder (with an all-too-conveniently recorded conversation with Mr. Robertson...), and clothes. (Chuck Mulvehill who plays the Robertson who dies looks bigger than Nicholson, but part of the movie magic here is that his clothes fit Nicholson.)

Why Locke is so fed up with his own life is not really limned (even less than the bases for dissatisfaction of the woman who disappeared in "L'avventura" and much less than those of the photographer who disappears at the end of "Blow-Up," having failed to resolve whether he had photographed a murder). David Locke does not like what he has been seeing and recording in the brutal African dictatorship. There are flashbacks, including footage he shot in Africa that are viewed by his "widow" Rachel (Jenny Runacre). There is one mention of an adopted daughter, but leaving her fatherless is apparently not an impediment on Locke's decision to assume another identity.

Rachel is devoted to him and attempts to find him as he caroms across Spain (from northeast to southeast) to warn him that as Robertson he is in grave danger. Impersonating Robertson, he finds out for himself that Robertson was an arms dealer, supplying munitions to rebels against the African dictator whom he had interviewed when he was David Locke. (Locke had sought to visit the rebels and failed at the start of the film; as Robertson, they find him--twice.)

Through its London embassy, that government is interested in the whereabouts of Robertson. Rachel is initially interested in finding Robertson as the last person to speak to her dead husband. When she realizes that the dead man was not her husband, her pursuit becomes more intense, and she is trailed. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that those following her are the rebel forces' agent rather than the government, though this does not really matter to the thriller plot.

And Antonioni, who famously maintained that cinema need not be aimed at entertaining, did not feel constrained by the conventions of the thriller genre. His gaze (camera's gaze) explored rooms at a leisurely pace as in the opening of "L'eclisse" and was often looking out, most famously in the very long (6.5-minute) penultimate shot that slowly moves toward the barred window of a Spanish hotel room and then out and around and, eventually, back into the room. In addition to this looking away from the action, there are other instances of "Robertson" asking the never-named young woman he picked up in Barcelona (played by Maria Schneider, who I was surprised to learn has appeared in 50 movies, since "The Passenger" and "The Last Tango in Paris" are the only ones I've heard of (and seen)) to tell him to look out and tell him what she sees. Being considerably more fluent than he is in Spanish, she also collects information from policemen and others and reports back to him.

He wonders aloud several times why she is with him, but she does not take the invitation to tell him (and her last conversation shown in the movie suggests her attaching herself to him was motivated by something other than his sexual animal magnetism...). And his final words are a heavily portentous story about a man who he used to know who was blind until his mid-40s when an operation gave him sight. The formerly blind man was at first enchanted to see the world, but was soon disappointed, seeing how much dirt and grime there was in the world (see Antonioni's first color film, "Red Desert"),* and killed himself three years after gaining sight. Especially in retrospect, this seems to relate to Nicholson's character's disenchantment with taking on a new identity (though to me it seems that his old life hunting him down is more a danger that he sees than that the identity he has taken on is of someone imperiled by what went before in his (Robertson's) life).

The long-delayed DVD is seven minutes longer than the theatrical release that I saw in 1975. Since much less of the film is set in Africa than I remember (most of it is set in Spain, and the African scenes were filmed in Spain), I have no idea what has been added, but the pace is very slow for a thriller. The colors are more vivid than I remember. As in "Red Desert," they really jump out, especially in the dry and barren terrain (blue shutters, colorful blankets rolled up on camels, etc.). There is always much to look at in an Antonioni film, and to enjoy them one has to jettison the expectation that what is going to be seen has any relationship to advancing plots...or even characterization. That is, interpreting what the camera gazes at is a very risk business.

In my Antonioni retrospective this year (beginning before Antonioni died), I've come to doubt the distinctiveness of an alienation "trilogy" (L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse). The film he made immediately before (Ill Grido) and after (Il deserto rosso) seem to me to have characters even more alienated than those in the "trilogy." (Moreover, Monica Vitti does not seem particularly alienated in "L'avventura," nor does Alain Delon in "L'eclisse"; for that matter, Vitti's character has occasions of joy in "L'eclisse" and I'm now not even sure that the final segment in which neither appears means that they did not keep the rendez-vous they arranged in their last conversation within the film). David Locke is plenty alienated, and I'm far from convinced that supplying the rebels was more than a business proposition for Mr. Robertson -- that is, that he admired them or believed in their cause.

(And, although identifying himself as a Marxist, I don't see Antonioni's films as Marxist in any sense. There is a flirtation with the Black Panthers (and Weathermen) in "Zabriskie Point," but there is a politically very ambiguous scene in the apartment of a racist wife whose husband owns a plantation in East Africa, and the rebels against one of the many brutal African dictatorships in "The Passenger" are not glamorized.)

The visuals of "The Passenger" (filmed by Luciano Tovoli) make it worth watching. From the perspective of the present, it also offers Jack Nicholson as an actor capable of subtle performance (pre "Shining"). There is much that is enigmatic about the characters, including his (which viewers of Antonioni films should be used to!) and no "thriller music" (and only a little ambient music). In "The Passenger," Antonioni wandered away from mystery/thriller plot less than in "Blow-Up." Whether that is admirable or deplorable different viewers will differ in judging. I like the exuberant digressions of "Blow-Up," and think that if plot is going to be central, the audience should be given more information than it is in "The Passenger."

The print transferred to DVD is sensational (probably the colors here are more vivid than what I saw in a 1975 theater). There are two commentary tracks, one recorded by a gravelly voiced Nicholson, the other by scenarist Mark Peploe and journalist Aurora Irvine, who like David Locke in the movie, fails to ask probing questions). Neither is very informative or analytical. Nicholson explains how that famous long, long shot moving through the bars of the hotel room window and back at it was done.

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+ I think that Nicholson's Locke becomes a passenger in the life Robertson was planning/leading, though Maria Schneider is a passenger in the white convertible (with bright red seats) that he buys in Barcelona midway through the film. Neither knows where the journey is going (or does she? Is she the "Daisy" whom Robertson was supposed to meet?)...

* Speaking of grimy, as Nicholson's Robertson does, I was struck at how grimy Gaudi's "La Perdrera" in Barcelona looked in 1975. I was hoping that when Schneider and Nicholson were on its roof there would be a glimpse of La Sagrada Familla in the distance, so I could see how much of it has been built since then, but was disappointed. In contrast, Antonioni seemed to find the world infinitely fascinating to look at, particularly stark deserts and bourgeois household interiors...

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray


The other stations of the Antonioni cross:
Cronaca di una amore (1950)
L'amíche (1955)
Il Grido (1958),
L'Aventtura (1960)
La Notte (1961)
L'eclisse (1962),
Il derserto ross (Red Desert, 1964),
Blow-Up (1966),
Il misterio de Oberwald (1980),
and his disappointing contribution to the trilogy Eros (2004, but see the bonus feature on it of Antonioni and an earlier Michelangelo!)




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD