The Passenger

Another dense masterpiece from Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger follows a man who tries to rediscover himself by running away from everything he has ever known. David Locke (Jack Nicholson) fakes his own death by trading identities with a dead man, unwittingly involving himself in the dead man's dangerous intrigues. He soon finds himself running away from the man he once was and grappling with the person he has become. He meets a free-thinking, libertine woman (the always beautiful and captivating Maria Schneider) and they go on a journey that is part holiday and part getaway.

The Passenger is almost a thriller, not quite a love story, but it is primarily a study the nature of self, identity and ones relationship with others in the abstract. Locke's personal and legal rejection of everything that makes him David Locke changes the way he relates to everything and everyone around him. He adopts the dead man's persona, but never truly embraces it: so who is he really? During the course of the movie he defines himself more in terms of what he rejects (and flees) than what he espouses. His relationship with Schneider's character (significantly we never learn her name) is indissoluble and fleeting at the same time; their conversations are abstract existential musings. They never know each other, and in a sense neither are knowable. Watch: draw your own conclusions, please.

A word about Jack. I feel as though his most well-know, defining roles (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, The Shining, Chinatown, to an extent, and others) are portrayed as vibrant dynamos, characters that truly burst off the screen. He certainly is a brilliant and dynamic actor, and fantastic in those movies. In The Passenger his character, by its very nature, will not grab you like many of his other roles -- but he is great. His lesser roles (lesser by virtue of prominence, not quality) are often of a more subdued nature, which is something I have only learned in the last year or so. I would recommend The King of Marvin Gardens and highly recommend Five Easy Pieces as good movies and another side of Jack. OK, back to The Passenger.

An Antonioni movie with a plot! The first such movie that I have seen from him, which is not a knock on the other two in any way. He achieves a striking balance between the world of Nicholson and Schneider and everyone else who is being themselves, playing the parts they have cultivated their whole lives. The opening scenes in the Sahara Desert are disorienting, brilliantly so for the opening of this movie. He makes very limited use of flashbacks, accenting rather than driving the narrative and characterization in interesting ways. The photography is, of course, brilliant. It was shot by Luciano Tovoli (god damn those Italians really have a knack for beautiful composition). I have two favorite shots. while driving down a tree-lined Spanish road, Schneider asks Jack what he is trying to get away from, Jack replies "Face the back of the car," which she does, and as she looks at everything behind them from the back seat while the car flies forward the camera catches her from below, we see only her erect figure set against the canopy rushing by overhead. Description does not do justice. The penultimate shot is sublime, and I am not quite sure how they did it; it defies description. No one knows how to end a movie like Antonioni.

The Passenger manages to be both artistic and captivating, abstract yet grounded. The plot and the point reinforce each other throughout, cemented by flawless direction. Of the Antonioni movies that I have seen, Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, being the others, I would recommend this for a first Antonioni movie. It unmistakably bears his touch but it is much more accessible than the other two. So watch this first and hopefully it won't be your last.