Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)
All I remembered from seeing The Passenger in the 1970s was that I got little out of it. Forty-odd years later, and a few Antonioni pictures the wiser, I thought I should try again. It didn’t go well.
The film begins in the Sahara desert, where David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a television journalist, is trying to complete a documentary (apparently alone, without any sign of a camera crew) about the long-running civil war in post-colonial Chad. He’s already showing signs of frustration when, during a journey to interview rebel fighters, his land rover gets stuck in a sand dune. Now thoroughly fed up, Locke slogs back on foot to his hotel. His discovery there of the dead body of David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), a fellow guest with whom he was on friendly terms, doesn’t shock him out of his grumpy mood. It, rather, reinforces Locke’s awareness of his cafard. He decides to assume Robertson’s identity in the hope of making a new start – it emerges that, as well as currently thwarted in his professional life, Locke was unhappy in his personal one. It emerges too that Robertson was a gunrunner for the Chadian rebels. The rest of the narrative – set in London, Munich, Barcelona and a small town in Andalusia – describes how Locke’s decision gives him the worst of both worlds. Antonioni is into illustrating the inescapability of selfhood and the dangerous consequences of wearing the identity of an internationally wanted man.
To read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia[1], you might get the entirely mistaken impression that The Passenger (with a screenplay by Mark Peploe, Antonioni and Peter Wollen) is a fast-moving thriller. If you go on to look at the ‘Production’ section of the article, and the amount of text devoted to description of a single seven-minute tracking shot in the closing stages of this torpid ‘drama’, you’ll get a better idea of where Antonioni’s priorities lie. This shot is absorbing but purely as a technical composition. A few other things catch or hold your attention. As a student with whom the protagonist has a stop-go liaison, Maria Schneider has a surprisingly assertive walk. In the role of Locke’s ‘widow’, Jenny Runacre, after speaking and moving languorously through most of her scenes, suddenly and comically switches at the eleventh hour to running around urgently. The various alien hotels Locke finds himself in are stronger characters than most of the human beings on the screen. Some of the details of Spanish life in the dying days of Franco’s rule are interesting in a virtually documentary sense. The film’s Italian title, Professione: reporter, is curiously specific in light of its English one: the ambiguity of who the passenger refers to is more in keeping with Antonioni’s appetite for mystification.
The themes of essential identity and alienation play out in the person of Jack Nicholson, to an extent that it’s hard to believe was intended. Whether he’s miscast by accident or perverse design is unclear; there’s no doubt that, starved of dynamic interaction with other actors, Nicholson is a fish out of water. The cinema historian Virginia Wright Wexman described Antonioni as ‘a post-religious Marxist and existential intellectual’ and this film does raise questions of an existential order at the level of watching it. What does it all mean? Why am I here? I lost consciousness for a few minutes and spent several more wondering whether to give up. I stayed the course, having lost not just the will to live but the will to leave. The Passenger’s listlessness proved infectious.
8 January 2019
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(1975_film)
