WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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THE PASSENGER was out of U.S. release for almost two decades because Jack Nicholson bought the rights to it and refused to release it - why is a mystery.

Antonioni originally cut a 4 hour version of the film, and then had it cut by editor Franco Arcalli to just under 2 ½ hours. But MGM, which had the rights for the film, insisted that it be cut to under 2 hours. This is shorter by about 5 minutes than the version of THE PASSENGER released outside America under the title PROFESSION: REPORTER. In 1983, Antonioni publicly condemned the MGM version. The film now re-released is the European-cut, which restores two critical scenes. Unfortunately the other missing 20 minutes in Antonioni’s cut seem to be lost.

In THE PASSENGER, Nicholson plays a journalist named David Locke who is finishing a documentary about guerillas somewhere in the North African desert. When he finds a talkative stranger named Robertson dead in his hotel room, he exchanges identities with the corpse. He switches passports and clothes and begins to assume the role of the dead man. He meets a girl, played by Maria Schneider, who travels with him.

Like many Antonioni films, THE PASSENGER is about everything and nothing. Derek Malcolm, the British critic for The Guardian, most eloquently said that “one admires….Antonioni’s films without feeling fond of them; or one resists them, turning a blind eye to their beauty…his films teach us to see as we’ve never seen before.”

The reporter in The Passenger is running away from his life, but can’t escape. His wife and friends are searching for him, but they are burdens on his feeble attempt to establish himself in his new identity, to find freedom in the life of the dead man. Locke is on the run, but true escape means escaping from himself, and that is impossible.

The PASSENGER is a summation of Antonioni’s pre-occupation with the weight of existence. In the early Antonioni films, especially the great trilogy of L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, and in his first film in color, The Red Desert, Antonioni was the first filmmaker to use beautiful women, particularly Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau, as his canvas for these existential questions. In THE PASSENGER, as in his BLOW UP, this search for identity, and for what is real, has male provenance. But the issues are the same. In THE RED DESERT, an alienated Monica Vitti stares at the beautiful yellow smoke pushing from the industrial chimneys. In THE PASSENGER, Nicholson drives into the vast emptiness of the North African desert.

It would be easy to understate just how sophisticated, intelligent, elegant THE PASSENGER is by focusing on the rather rambling plot. Antonioni, in all of his visual brilliance, is an artist who works in layers. Something is happening in the foreground, but perhaps even more important to our understanding is the relative stillness of the background. One could easily ponder the politics of THE PASSENGER. At the beginning of the film, Locke is finishing a documentary about the rebels in Chad who are battling a brutal dictator. The focus shifts. As Locke gets deeper into Robertson’s life, he discovers that Robertson was a much-sought-after gunrunner who traded arms to the rebels. In this respect, Robertson trading arms to the “democratic” revolutionaries in Chad is eerily prescient of our militarization of the “democrats” in Islamic countries in the mideast.

THE PASSENGER ends with a legendary last shot. It is hard to conceive exactly how Antonioni did it – but it is one of those grand moments in cinema that sends shivers up your spine. The long, seven-minute shot passes through the narrow bars of a window as it frames Nicholson. It moves into a courtyard, and then it moves back through the bars again. An eternity has been captured in those seven minutes of a fluid camera eye. The first time we see Nicholson, he is alive. The second time, he is dead.

It is an astonishing moment that leaves you with a lump in your throat, awestruck. It is a moment of genius, as if the camera followed the life force as it escapes from Nicholson in his last breath, a moment in which art transgresses and becomes life.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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