The Passenger

[kinjitsu]

I always find remarkable the seamlessly shot and edited sequence when Locke listens to his conversation with Robertson, that, and the entire opening sequence that precedes it.

[ellipsis7]

Derek Malcolm's Century of Films

Michelangelo Antonioni: Passenger

'The Guardian', Thursday June 1, 2000

It was once said that one admires Michelangelo Antonioni's films without feeling fond of them; or one resists them, turning a blind eye to their beauty. It has also been said that his films teach us to see as we've never seen before. There's an element of truth in these statements, particularly as far as his great trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse are concerned.

These remarkable works, made in the early 60s, are deeply pessimistic love stories. They are disorientating because conventional narrative is always avoided and it often seems that nothing whatever is happening except within the minds, or possibly the confused souls, of the participants.

Jeanne Moreau, who starred with Marcello Mastroianni as the loveless couple in La Notte, once said to me: "God, I was bored. But you can't argue with Antonioni. He never replies." Even so, the three films are revolutionary in form, eloquent in content and can affect you deeply. Is he the Henry James of film-making?

It's unorthodox to prefer the far later Passenger and the fact I do probably says more about me than about the film (its alternative title is Profession: Reporter). But it too is a remarkable work and a major return to form after the incoherent, shallow Zabriskie Point. It is a bit like a heavily intellectualised Graham Greene story, partly because of its screenplay, by Mark Peploe and structuralist critic Peter Wollen (who was once a political correspondent in foreign parts) and partly because Antonioni was concerned with spiritual values. Jack Nicholson plays a burnt-out reporter who exchanges his identity with that of a man he finds dead in a North African hotel room. He does this to get away from the mess of his old life but discovers he is being haunted not only by a wife and friends who go in search of him but by strangers who are not going to do him any good. He starts a relationship with a younger woman (played by Maria Schneider) but the further he goes to escape his previous life, the worse the situation becomes. He ends up sharing the same fate as the man whose mask he has taken.

The film is beautifully shot by Luciano Tovoli in France, Spain and North Africa and intimates as much about the contemporary political situation as it does about the state of its protagonist's mind. It also contains several amazing sequences, including a seven-minute take that has seldom been equalled - a shot that passes through the narrow bars of a window to frame Nicholson, moves into a courtyard then moves back to look through the bars again. The first time we see Nicholson, he is alive. The second time he is dead. Curiously, at one point in the film, Schneider finds a gun in Nicholson's luggage and he takes it from her with a gruff "No." It fits the film, but it also fits the fact that Schneider shot Marlon Brando in Last Tango, the film that made her famous. One dead star is perhaps enough for one so young.

Antonioni is known for his capacity to express alienation visually. The Passenger does that, as does Blow-Up and the aforementioned trilogy. The comparison has to be with painting, but also with a novelist's ability to describe both a scene and a state of mind. If Antonioni is not particularly fashionable now, that's our loss, not his.

[Gordon]

Review at Upcoming Discs.

Not a site I trust, but I thought I'd pass this on.

[Narshty]

Nice to have the confirmation about the two commentaries.

I find myself divided over what is brilliant and what is just art-wanking.

Don't we all?

[pemmican]

Now if only ZABRISKIE POINT were to be released on DVD... A new print was struck a few years ago and played the Vancouver film festival, but nada since...

A.

[stroszeck]

I actually found Zabriskie Point, as I watched it again along with L'ecclise in preparation for my Passenger DVD arrival, to be a HUGE misstep for Antonioni, something which is rare for him. I don't know, it was just an absolute bungled mess of a film. Again, I think Roger Ebert's review really does the film justice. I hate to admit it, but I think I'm becoming an Ebertite. #-o

[ellipsis7]

I think ZP works if you recognise that Antonioni is looking at American society and youth through alien almost anthropologically probing eyes...Look at his fascination with the billboards by the roadside in the early scenes... Almost the same piercing revealing gaze that saw in new ways which so annoyed the Chinese government in CHUNG KUO CINA...

[Gigi M.]

Savant's review

[Gordon]

DVD Beaver comparison between the Sony and the Imagica (Japanese) edition HERE.

Darker is better it seems. Colours look more natural, too. The low bitrate on the Sony is strange, though; I thought that Sony had stopped that compression bullshit. Kudos, though - for once.

[Matango]

Maybe she's a friend of Peploe who interviews him for the commentary, kind of like Soderbergh and Nichols on CATCH-22.

I'd use a pseudonym, too, if I was going to go down as the most superfluous commentator in home video history.

[Gigi M.]

Man... Last night I listened to the Nicholson commentary and was very impressed. I didn't know Jack could be so thoughtful and caring for this film. He's love and admiration for Antonioni is incredible. Thanks Jack.

[Matango]

Anyone notice that lower photo on the back of the DVD case? It shows Nicholson drinking champagne in a bar or somewhere, and looking like he's celebrating something. Any ideas about what that missing scene could have been? Also, how come not a single Oscar nomination? As an Italian film did it not qualify? Or did it pass everyone by back then?

[ltfontaine]

Also, how come not a single Oscar nomination? As an Italian film did it not qualify? Or did it pass everyone by back then?

The film was generally well received when initially released, but was not regarded with the same esteem that has accrued to it in the intervening years. There was also a sense at the time among some in the film community that The Passenger was not up the standards set by the director's groundbreaking films of the early sixties, none of which had been nominated either. Blow-Up had garnered two Academy Award nominations--Antonioni's only recognition by the Academy prior to presentation of his honorary award in 1994--but Zabriskie Point had played some role in tarnishing Antonioni's popularity in the interim, especially among the Academy's more conservative members—of whom there were more in 1975 than there are today.

[Barmy]

Don't mean to be rude, but I always wonder why anyone cares whether a film got nominated for an OscarTM. I checked the relevant 1975 nominees and they weren't all that bad.

Best Picture Winner: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - Saul Zaentz; Michael Douglas

Other Nominees:
Barry Lyndon (1975) - Stanley Kubrick
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) - Martin Bregman; Martin Elfand
Jaws (1975) - Richard D. Zanuck; David Brown
Nashville (1975) - Robert Altman

Best Actor in a Leading Role Winner: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - Jack Nicholson

Other Nominees:
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) - Al Pacino
Give 'em Hell, Harry! (1975) - James Whitmore
Man in the Glass Booth, The (1975) - Maximilian Schell
Sunshine Boys, The (1975) - Walter Matthau

[ltfontaine]

I checked the relevant 1975 nominess and they weren't all that bad.

We can only long for the days when five English-language films of such quality were released in a single year.

And not to forget the award winner for Best Foreign Film of 1975: Dersu Uzala.

[Matango]

Don't mean to be rude, but I always wonder why anyone cares whether a film got nominated for an OscarTM. I checked the relevant 1975 nominees and they weren't all that bad.

I just thought it was curious how Chinatown ('74) and Cuckoo's Nest ('75) got 20 nominations between them, and The Passenger got none. I'd be the last person to use Oscar nominations as a benchmark of a film's worth.

[Barmy]

Actually, it appears that in the 70s sometimes Oscar and quality coincided.

[BWilson]

When the DVD was first announced wasn't there going to be a Wim Wenders commentary? What happened?

[kekid]

Barrie Maxwell of "Digitalbits" has the following to say about the DVD of "The Passenger":

"Real dross is Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, a stunningly dull 1975 exercise in boredom and inaccessibility that Jack Nicholson somehow found himself convinced to star in. He plays a film journalist who seizes an opportunity to switch identities with a dead man who turns out to have been an arms dealer. The film turns into a game of hide and seek in North Africa and Southern Europe as Nicholson tries to flee from both his new identity's past as well as people related to his own real past. Maria Schneider plays a young woman who travels along with him, but one who may be more than she appears on the surface. Is she the passenger of the film's title or is it Nicholson who's a passenger in the life of the man whose identity he's assumed? The film drags along for over two hours to a bizarrely filmed conclusion and it's a good thing that Sony (Columbia) added audio commentaries by Nicholson and by screenwriter Mark Peploe or else we wouldn't know what the hell is going on. Mind you, Sony rarely graces its catalogue offerings with any thought when it comes to supplements. It's ironic then that they managed to do so on a film that doesn't merit the attention. The disc's anamorphic transfer looks soft at times and has modest debris."

I will let the readers form their own views of Mr. Maxwell's assessment.

[tavernier]

Yikes! Wait until he sees Munk's PASSENGER - he'll be wishing he never strayed from the likes of PASSENGER 57....

[Narshty]

Having read numerous examples of his capsule reviews in his column, I don't think Barrie Maxwell's especially "dumb", he's just a classical Hollywood boy through and through. That said, it doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try to understand movies that have a high critical reputation.

I enjoyed the bizarre U-turn on Bresson between his two reviews of Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket though. I've no intention of getting the boot in for the sake of it, but his final sentence discussing the film itself in that Pickpocket review is almost offensive in its idiocy.

[Gordon]

It isn't worth one's time pointing out Maxwell's meatheaded reviews. Far better, is Mark Le Fanu's review of The Passenger in July's, Sight & Sound, which also includes Guido Bonsaver's brief, but interesting overview of Antonioni's life and films after 1975.

Barrie Maxwell often has the skinny on upcoming DVD releases before anyone else, so he isn't totally useless. The power of Bresson's films can be very hard to articulate. I didn't think much of Pickpocket when I first experienced it and I could easily have dismissed it, or mocked it. Frankly, I don't feel that it is all that great, nowhere near as powerful as A Man Escaped, Mouchette, Au hasard Balthazar or L'argent. I think that it is because the protagonist is a pickpocket, which is an innocuous crime, though victims would disagree, but perhaps if he had been a hitman or crooked cop who finds redemption, I would find it more interesting. Like Melville, whom I also greatly admire, Bresson's style often infuriates as well as enthralls me and Pickpocket tends to bother me the most, though the montage is sublime.

The Passenger, can be a confounding experience, if one expects another "Jack Nicholson 70s classic" or chic critique of modern malaise from Antonioni. Even if one expects the standard chase-thriller, one will be disappointed. Like Bresson, Antonioni's films are hard to fully appreciate on the initial viewing and tend to haunt the memory, drawing one back at least once, where they start to take on another dimension, if one watches closely.

Maxwell has excellent taste - in mainstream 'Classical' American Cinema, and that's great, but if he is going to venture into European Cinema of the same vintage, then he ought to take as much care in writing as he does with everything else. There are plenty of clunky, flatly-lit, ego-vehicle Hollywood epics that he clearly loves that I could indignantly dismiss, but then I'd apparently "be in the minority" and God knows I don't want that. 8-[

[ellipsis7]

THE PASSENGER on a single screen release at the NFT London has just produced the top screen average for any film in UK/Ireland for the period... Over 2 weeks it pulled in box office of $81,000 (despite the rival attractions of the World Cup!) Full story here....