I went to see The Passenger (aka Professione: reporter), the 1975 feature directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, last night at a free screening; this was my first experience of this important film. The film had been rereleased in late 2005, and was showing at the same theater I went to see Brokeback Mountain for the first time on Saturday, 18 February 2006--I remember seeing the poster while standing in line, and regretting that I would have to defer my chance to see it until later. (That ended up being much later...in the wake of Brokeback Mountain, I had no energy or desire for other movies for some time).
So this was a second opportunity (maybe once in a lifetime) to see this work, as it was made and meant to be seen...as a 35-millimeter print projected onto a movie screen. The screening was fairly well-attended, so perhaps others were of a like mind, though there seemed to be a significant amount of restlessness in some members, with a few walkouts noticeable.
Antonioni, though one of the supremely great filmmakers (he died earlier this year after more than two decades of poor health), is not for all tastes. His pacing is deliberately patient and observant, his mood overridingly one of alienation and dislocation. He presents a pessimistic view of late twentieth-century man, but filters this through a prism of visual and aural poetry, rendering the pessimism equivocal by virtue of the intelligence and artistry of which the human mind is capable.
The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson as British TV reporter David Locke who, while on location in an unnamed African country, is ambiguously motivated to switch identities with a stranger with whom he becomes casually acquainted and who dies suddenly at the hotel in which they are both lodged. So Locke officially becomes dead to the world, while Robertson lives on in a new body. What Locke doesn't realize is that Robertson was an illegal arms smuggler, and unwittingly inherits Robertson's connections and responsibilities with his new identity.
The story is set up to become a thriller, but Antonioni frustrates and redirects this trajectory in a number of ways. Narrative is less important here than the evocation of mood and the delineation of existential freedom and angst. During the course of his international travels (the film was shot in Algeria, Britain, West Germany, and Spain), Locke meets up with a young woman (played by Maria Schneider), who is no less mysteriously motivated to become this strange man's fellow traveller and lover. Both are running away from the certainties of their past existences into an uncharted and potentially perilous future. And running after them, locked into attitudes of certainty and social expectation, are Locke's wife (played by Jenny Runacre), who comes to realize what her husband has done, and Robertson's (now Locke's) twin nemeses, his illicit accomplices and the law.
There is a subdued quality to Nicholson's performance, and Schneider and Runacre are both strangely affectless in their respective personae. This woodenness may have been deliberate on Antonioni's part, to convey a sense of alienation, which seems to me to be Antonioni's major theme in his body of work. Inspired use is made of the many exotic locations in which the story is set, and the film's (anti-)climax is a stunningly bravura sequence of camerawork (obviously inspired by Michael Snow's 1967 experimental film Wavelength) that literally pushes Locke to the periphery of the action, becoming the dead center of the other characters' frenetic and bewildered attentions.
Antonioni was the supreme cinematic poet of urban alienation, and even in a film like The Passenger, where much of the narrative transpires in rural settings, the blighted reach of twentieth-century urban man is shown to be limitless. Though not as fine as Antonioni's earlier L'eclisse and Il deserto rosso, this film remains a resonant work of art, capable of coloring one's experiences of the world outside the film itself, which is perhaps the most salient qualification of artistic greatness I know.