The Passenger

The structure, so reminiscent of L'Avventura, but with the opposite momentum: in L'Avventura, the lovers are wandering aimlessly from place to place, while in The Passenger Nicholson and Schneider are running away from his wife and the police for the last 50 minutes of the movie, sometimes making narrow escapes.You can't really understand To Kill A Mockingbird until you can thematize the hingelike relationship between Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. Similarly, in The Passenger, one must understand the relationship between impulsively changing your identity, and the world of politics and revolution. When David Locke impulsively assumes the identity of Robertson, he has become a gunrunner providing guns to revolutionaries in Africa. Locke is forced to confront the political world as an actor rather than as an observer (as a journalist he had interviewed the fascist dictator whose minions are now pursuing him as Robertson).Perhaps the link between the two concepts is the fact that a revolution is a starting-over, a violent abandoning of an enormous past, a step into an unknown future. The dislocation is profound. And the old guard, the dictatorship, clings to power with all its might, resisting change. Just as a person's identity clings to him or her, not so willing to be thrown away.The arc of the movie is described by Locke himself near the end, when he tells the story of a blind man who regained his sight. After an initial period of elation, the blind man began to notice the ugliness, the dirtiness of the world. He retreated into his room and eventually killed himself. Similarly, David Locke, initially exhilarated by his new identity (he said to Robertson, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could leave each day behind, forget about it and start over?"), becomes depressed by it as the film goes on. He says to Maria Schneider, "Let's go eat. The old me is hungry."Soon after their meeting, as they are driving in his convertible, Schneider asks Locke, "What are you running away from?" He replies, "Turn your back to the front seat." She turns and sees a tree-lined road receding behind her. At first she smiles, amused by his metaphor. Then her smile fades as she senses the falseness of his position.At the end Locke is murdered by the dictator's secret police. But do they know his real identity? Do they believe they are murdering Robertson? Or do they realize that Locke is an impostor, and they are eliminating the impostor? In any case, Locke dies as another man. And when the police show his wife his dead body, she says significantly, "I never knew him," which means, "I never knew Robertson" but also "I never knew my husband. I never thought him capable of a stunt like taking on another man's identity."My favorite sequence is the beginning, where the Africans treat Locke with arrogant indifference, and the empty desert helps conspire to frustrate him in his desire to get a story about the guerrillas who are fighting against the fascist government. There is an impressive aridity about this sequence, which is followed by the hotel's airy interior, where Locke converses with Robertson. The ceiling fan is used ingeniously by Antonioni as a time lapse device. We see Locke sitting at the table in his checked shirt, the camera looks up at the fan, and when it returns to Locke he is wearing Robertson's blue shirt.When Locke finds Robertson's body and decides to take on his identity, he correctly assumes that the Africans who run the hotel won't know the difference between one white man and another. He tells them Locke is dead, and they immediately inform the authorities.The film ends with the famous shot of the camera in Locke's room moving slowly toward the window, then through the bars of the window, as Locke is murdered off screen. Once outside the hotel, the camera watches the police arrive and take Locke's wife to the room where he is lying dead.The color lime green plays an important visual role in the movie. It is seen in the African hotel, it is on a wall in the German sequence, it it bathes the entire large restaurant where Locke and the girl are found by the police, who tell Schneider that Locke's wife thinks he is in danger.The Sony transfer is magnificent. The movie looks better on my plasma TV than it looked in the theater. There are commentaries by Jack Nicholson, interesting,[for instance, when Schneider says "People disappear every day" and Locke replies significantly, "every time they leave the room," Nicholson comments that he himself added this line to the screenplay] and screenwriter Mark Peploe, less interesting.A complex, thought-provoking thriller which re-established Antonioni as a great filmmaker after the critical disaster of Zabriskie Point.

It's hard to judge this movie. It's meditative and windswept and transfers the feeling of traveling to remote places where you are an unknown amongst people you do not know. Its premise was more intriguing than the actual experience of watching the story unfold however, which is slow indeed. Being a traveler and amateur photography buff myself, I have great patience for looking at travel photos and find National Geographic magazine interesting, if not for the reading than at least for the photography of exotic places and the work of talented photographers. My girlfriend however doesn't have that same love of pictures and won't spend much time critcally analyzing what makes a picture good or bad..So how to judge this movie becomes the issue for me. This is no high speed ride. It's fine cinematography with a few shots that are probably more famous than the movie (she in back of the car as the trees go by her is an incredibly beautiful visual image). The story again while conceptually interesting didn't go as deep for me as it seemed to for other reviewers. While forgivable, I didn't find the scenes where Jack interacts with the arms buyers extremely likely - he obviously looked like he didn't know what was going on and I didn't wholly buy their complete oblivion to this.. I liked the girl. She was a real work of art. Her presence in the movie made about as much sense as anything else, but I was glad she was there. It was a fun "what if" study. What if a man went to the extreme of getting rid of his whole history in this way? This idea is probably attractive to most people from time to time in their lives, so there's no question that the idea appeals. The next question is would such a thing be possible, and would it play out something like the way it is depicted in "The Passenger"? My gut reation to that is probably "no". But these are not the most important questions - like one of the interviewees says to Jack when he asks him loaded questions before an interview. The questions tell you more about the asker than the subject questioned. For me, the question is what makes this a good movie? Is it a good movie or a great movie? The answer will depend on the criterion that you bring.If being intellectually or intuitionally intrigued is a condition for your idea of a great movie, then.. you will have to answer whether or not it does that for you. For me, there were moments. Definite moments. There was always this kind of vast isolation, and mild uneasiness wrapped up in a sense of possibility that didn't seem likely to produce. But the journey seemed a worthwhile one just for the sake of being what it was - an attempt to escape. Chances are, our watching these movies is nothing less than that same urge, on some level. Thus, the protagonists story has meaning and was worthwhile for me. Other things too, make it worthwhile. Antonioni's rendering of the story - the scenery and some of the scenes were worthwhile. One I liked - near the end, a little girl is casually blowing a bubble as Jack is walking by, and that pink bubble just gets bigger and bigger, but before it pops - the shot stops. The concept of the movie, the subdued loveliness of the actress very much a part of the Spanish landscape, the moments of sparse dialogue where brilliance occasionally flashes through - I tip my hat to all these things - but what keeps me from giving this movie 5 stars is that it didn't succeed in helping ME escape. And while the ending was fitting and somewhat ironic, it didn't blow me away content wise. And let me also say that while there are some good shots in this movie camerawise, there are also many that go on long enough to test your endurance. So much so, that I could go look outside my window for ten minutes and have a similar emotional reaction. Not usually what I go to the movies for. So, all things considered, the movie'll probably be even more interesting for viewers after they've seen it, should they care to think about it, rather than while they are undergoing the actual movie.