The Passenger

The Passenger – The title for Antonioni’s film in Italian is Professione: Reporter. Released in 1975, The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. Although elliptical, the movie takes the form of a thriller and, in fact, utilizes Hitchcock’s device – the double chase. Nicholson is a photo-journalist covering a war in some godforsaken corner of the Sahara. A man staying at his dismal hotlel dies and Nicholson scissors out the dead guy’s passport picture, pastes it on his own passport, and exchanges identities with the deceased. There is a novel by Kafka called Der Verschollene – which means, “the man who disappeared” – and all of the Antonioni’s pictures could be captioned, in one way or another with this title. Nicholson becomes the “man who disappeared,” the male equivalent of the vanishing heroine of the L’Avventura. As it happens, the dead man was a gunrunner and Nicholson’s photo-journalist goes from being radically disengaged to being hopelessly engaged – entangled with the rebels who have paid him a large sum of money for weapons to use in the conflict. At the same time, Nicholson’s wife suspects that her husband’s death is something more complex and dispatches a friend, possibly her lover, to find the missing man. Ultimately, Nicholson’s character must flee the Spanish police, chasing him due to his entanglement with the gunrunners, and his wife and her friend who are trying to track him down in Barcelona and, then, on the seacoast. Along the way, this being an Antonioni film, the sullen hero picks up a beautiful young girl played by Maria Schneider, dallies with her, and, then, sends her away while awaiting his fate (assassination, it seems) in another picturesque, if remote, hotel. The film’s politics is muddled and its narrative style difficult to follow – Antonioni doesn’t use establishing shots, signals transitions between countries by utterances in the language where the shot is being made, and never employs normal film grammar – that is, fade-outs or dissolves – to punctuate or bracket sequences. Apparently, the theme of the film is that a radically disconnected journalist abandons that life for a commitment to a cause, presumably helping the rebels against a corrupt leader in the unnamed African country. This commitment, however, is well-paid and the motives of Nicholson’s reporter are profoundly obscure. Ultimately, he seems exhausted by the pursuit and simply decides to await the revenging furies that his deception has called down upon him: either he will be retrieved by his wife and end up tormented by her, or, if fortunate, the aggrieved gunrunners whom he has cheated will get to him first and put a bullet in his head. It’s hard to make a movie about an essentially passive hero and The Passenger suffers from the problem that if Nicholson doesn’t care about his own life, then, why should we. The final shot (in reality the penultimate) in the film is justly celebrated. It’s a long tracking that moves away from the room where Nicholson’s character awaits his fate. The camera magically passes through some bars and meanders about a kind of courtyard while the bad guys snuff-out the hero. Although showy, it’s also obvious that the tracking shot is motivated by the fact that Antonioni doesn’t know how to end the film, can’t figure out a way to stage the climax without making it look ridiculous or anti-climactic and so just avoids the whole problem by having the camera taking a little amble away from the film’s principal action. The shot is similar to the breathtaking track away from the murder victim in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) but not nearly as poetic or effective. Schneider is not a very good actress and her role is woefully underwritten – she’s basically “eye-candy” and her part makes no sense. This is not a successful movie by any means, but it is interesting and, even, fairly suspenseful. And the locations, including Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, are spectacular. (Curiously, Jack Nicholson owned the rights to the movie and wouldn’t authorize it’s re-release until 2005 when it came out on a DVD).