The Passenger (1975)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writer: Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Michelangelo Antonioni, based on a story by Mark Peploe
Stars: Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider

Index: The First Thirty.

As with Chinatown and the three remaining films in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, I’ve seen this one before. However, that was as long ago as 2008 and even then I realised that it wasn’t a one watch film. A fresh viewing at a different time in my life elevated it considerably for me.

It has a plot, but it’s not the point. Jack plays David Locke, a journalist struggling to land an interview with the rebels in a country we later learn is Chad. He’s on his own and he’s failing consistently. People guide him so far and then walk away, stranding him. His Land Rover gets stuck in a sand dune. Walking back to his hotel leaves him seriously sunburned.

When he discovers a fellow traveller dead in the next room, of natural causes, he takes the opportunity to swap identities with him. Now he’s David Robertson and he’s shed his old life that has ceased to have meaning any more. He doesn’t yet know that Robertson is dangerous, an arms dealer who has promised weapons to the very same rebels Locke failed to meet.

Back in London, his estranged wife Rachel is keen to find out what happened to him and his old colleagues want to make a documentary in his memory. So his old life isn’t behind him as much as he had expected. It’s ironically trying to reach Robertson to ask him about Locke.

This is a Michelangelo Antonioni movie, so Italian, even if it’s mostly in English, and the original title was simply Professione: reporter, an easy title to translate. It highlights that even if a reporter ditches a life of reporting, he’ll find that he’s still a reporter. The Passenger may be even deeper, because there are a whole slew of meanings and I may not have caught them all.

The most obvious is that he soon acquires a literal passenger, as he travels from London to Munich to Barcelona and onwards. She’s never given a name, which may be telling, but she’s a young and beautiful architecture student. She is his passenger, an external voice that is often akin to a conscience.

Most of the meanings are him though. He’s a passenger in David Robertson’s life now that David Robertson’s dead. He follows entries in his calendar, learning more about who his new identity really is and what it represents. Likely the most important is a man of conviction. We tend to see arms dealers nowadays as evil or at least amoral men who profit off the deaths of others. However, Robertson actually seems to care about these rebels. He supports what they are trying to do and his work is helping them.

As we learn more about Locke, we learn that he isn’t a man of conviction, because he tries for journalistic integrity. He thinks that helps his work, standing apart from those whom he interviews and refusing to take a moral stand. He’s very much just the facts, ma’am. Maybe, though, that’s kept him from the truth behind the facts and it’s holding him back. Maybe he’s been a passenger in his own life too, telling an approved version of a story rather than what’s really going on behind it.

Of course, with lots of people trying to track him down, for both good and bad reasons and on both sides of the law, this wasn’t ever likely to end well for David, whichever one he thinks of himself as at the time. And it doesn’t but it all comes to a head in an astounding shot that unfolds in a single six and a half minute take.

The camera starts inside David’s hotel room with him lying on the bed, but moves towards the barred window, voyeuristically looking at the world outside, at who comes and goes. It eventually moves so far through the bars that we can’t see them any more and it’s out there when David is shot, watching everyone as they arrive: the police, an ambulance, even Rachel in a taxi. Then it follows them as they go in and ends looking into the very window that it moved out of, at his body on the bed.

It’s quite the ambitious shot and apparently Antonioni built the hotel for it, including the bars on the window which were hinged so that they could open to allow the camera through, which then shifted from a track to the hook on a crane so a cameraman could guide it outside.

We don’t catch any dialogue during most of this shot but the most telling dialogue in the film arrives at the very end of it. A policeman asks both Rachel and the girl if they know the man on the bed. Rachel replies, “I never knew him”, which is true in two ways. She certainly never knew David Robertson, who she’d never met, but she also never really knew this man as David Locke, her husband. However, the girl answers differently. Yes, she replies, she knew him, and that’s true in two ways too. She knew this man that she’d travelled with but she also knew the real him, even for a mere few weeks.

Back in 2008, I got more of this movie than I thought I’d got, but I saw it piecemeal over the passage of a couple of weeks and that wasn’t at all optimal. It was certainly enough to see the approach Antonioni took to the movie, which is often sparse and minimal. Early scenes have very little dialogue, not only due to the lack of common language for characters, but also due to him looking at space and rhythms of living.

In his commentary, Nicholson suggests that actors weren’t particularly important to the director, who saw them as “moving spaces”. That didn’t stop Jack from delivering another of his powerful early seventies performances. It’s not as emphatic as any of the others, even The King of Marvin Gardens, played against type, though he does have some moments of letting off steam. Sometimes he’s downright hesitant, as Locke realises that Robertson is into serious things and isn’t sure how to present to others.

Ultimately, though, he’s playing a character who’s not really sure who he is even before he takes on a different identity and is even more unsure afterwards, but gradually finds himself anyway. The irony is that he’ll be remembered in different ways for each of those identities, but only the girl will remember the true him.

And us, of course, because we get to see this movie and in nicely remastered form through Sony Pictures Classics to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. That’s because Nicholson ended up with the rights, because of the legal quirks that surround the movie business, and kept it out of distribution until that point. However, he was involved enough with that particular release to provide a full length commentary.He calls it his biggest adventure in film and it’s easy to see why, given its locations, but I’d suggest that he was also talking about its huge acting challenge, one he met impressively.