THE PASSENGER

THE PASSENGER is one of Antonioni's greatest films. It falls into the same deeply enigmatic class as L'AVVENTURA and BLOW-UP, open-ended pictures that deal with unfullfilment, though to be fair, all of Antonioni's films deal with a lack of fulfilment, be it emotional or sexual. The passenger of the title is Jack Nicholson and he's a passenger in someone else's life, having ditched his own out of boredom or frustration. He's a reporter on the hunt for a 'serious' story in North Africa but all he finds are brick walls. When the man in the next hotel room dies suddenly he takes on his identity without knowing anything about him.

It turns out that the man is a gun-runner and Nicholson finds himself in a situation over which he has no control. Another director would have made this as a straight-forward thriller, perhaps a kind of BOURNE IDENTITY action flic, but for Antonioni the film has to be a mystery on the nature of identity, even if the film itself has a much more 'conventional' narrative than most of his pictures. It is, of course, a thriller of sorts though a very cerebral one.

It's full of great sequences and great images. Few directors use topography in quite the same way as Antonioni, be it the sun-drenched deserts of North Africa, the roof of the Gaudi house in Barcelona or a series of dead-end villages in the south of Spain and the film feels truly 'international', not just in terms of its locations but in the universality of its theme. Of course, by its very nature, the film, like BLOW-UP, remains at a remove from 'reality'. People don't go swapping identities with corpses that fortuitously turn up in the adjoining hotel room and if they did it's unlikely the corpse would be that of a gun-runner. Nor do they latch onto an attractive girl, (Maria Schneider from LAST TANGO IN PARIS), that they pick up in Barcelona having first briefly seen her reading a book on a bench in London. But worrying about plot points like this in a film by Antonioni is like worrying over whether Hamlet met the ghost of his father or not.



In what is one of his most understated performances Nicholson is, naturally, superb. The great script was written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni himself, the superb cinematography was by Luciano Tovoli and the film ends with stunning tracking shot and pan unlike anything else in cinema. Absolutely essential viewing.