The Passenger (1975)

Something of an 'event of the millennium' for Antonioni and Nicholson fans is the return of The Passenger to distribution after many years out of sight. (Word is that it will arrive on DVD this April. I wrote this review from memories of a showing this past January.) For an illuminating play-by-play of the film’s absence and return, click on over to Naachgaana – it’s found at the end of a wide-ranging piece on the film by Robert Koehler, whose name is unfamiliar to me, but who by his own account is a Hollywood insider.

The Passenger isn't really a "vehicle" per se for Jack Nicholson - no scene-chewing with roguishly-raked eyebrows here - and this is doubly ironic because of the film's title and the meaning the title brings to the lead role of David Locke. He's a successful international reporter who experiences a kind of personal crisis while on a difficult assignment in Saharan Africa. He sees an opportunity to trade identities with a dead man, and takes it, becoming a "passenger" in the dead man's life, no longer driving things but walking in the shoes of the deceased (using his address book for directions). After leaving Africa for Germany, Locke meets a young woman in Barcelona and begins traveling with her. By this time the shadows of the dead man's former business contacts begin to close in on Nicholson's character and his line of flight goes taut and perilous.

Most of the reviews I've seen take the obvious stance that Nicholson's character is "escaping from himself" as much as he's escaping his former life, wife, and business associates. That by itself would make The Passenger not much more than another Vietnam-era study in existentialism, along with Five Easy Pieces, Badlands, Last Tango In Paris, Taxi Driver,or Antonioni's own Zabriskie Point (beautiful desert, desolate dialogue) to name a few. These films all share a wandering-soul leading man, dialogue and situations ripe with disconnections and alienation, and – what smells like a cliché now – random, meaningless violence. Antonioni’s multilayered works go far beyond this formula, however, in both style and substance. Favoring long shots, super-slow pans and zooms, his passive camera is mute witness to a traumatized Europe; a zone rushing headlong into a future built upon, by and for American-style consumerism. Godard, Herzog, Tarkovsky, Wenders, Buñuel, Fellini, and Fassbinder all presented their own discursions on this weighty topic. But Antonioni made it his specialty, beginning with L’Avventura.

Seeing The Passenger today, however, after 30 years, brought no sense of datedness. In fact, current events impose powerful new meanings on the film. That aside, it’s not unreasonable to examine The Passenger as a meditation on the irreconcilable cultures of Europe and Africa. While Nicholson’s David Locke remains ambiguous in his motives for self-escape, there is a scene in the film that serves as a big tip-off – or tipping point – and is the key to an expanded understanding of what Antonioni’s up to. In it, Locke, the reporter, is confronted by one of his subjects, an African rebel. The man takes Locke’s microphone and begins to interrogate him. It seems to me that by this simple act are overturned hundreds of years of Euro-dominated world culture. The colonialist is made the subject. The ‘impenetrable’ African, victim and subject of endless exploitation and investigation, becomes the master of the situation, and suddenly seems much more open. No longer the mere muddy reflection of the European’s ‘darkest desires,’ the African has his own thoughts, he has an agenda, and he wants to succeed. His desiring-machines, if you will, are suddenly driving the bus. The Euro/American man becomes the passenger in this instance. And, not surprisingly, at that instant David Locke loses not just his authority but loses his voice and his identity as well.

Later in the film, more African revolutionaries become the active agents of Locke’s destruction, while Locke himself is a passive assassin – another kind of passenger – in his own termination. (It’s a finish reminiscent of what happens to Thomas Pynchon’s protagonist in Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, whose persona splits into fragments and disperses into a diaspora that exists just underneath world capitalist culture.) The end of the ride for Locke is situated in Gibraltar, the precise cultural and geographical point where Europe and Africa nearly, but never quite meet.

Maria Schneider, who plays Locke’s randomly chosen confidante in his last days, doesn’t arrive at any understanding or knowledge of him, a common trait in Antonioni couples. Her character is not open to interrogation, as it is predicated in large measure on the relationship to a man who will never be identified. At the very end, when called to identify the remains, Locke’s estranged wife says, “I never knew him.” We the audience are left to puzzle whether there’s any sentiment behind her on-the-surface expedient denial – a wish to somehow make sense of what’s in front of her (and the past she had with this man). Or is it a brutal erasure of her own history, anger at deception, or self-deception?

The richness of Antonioni’s work is the product of these and many more ambiguities. Full of the sexual alienation well known in his work, The Passenger is also a stark, sunburned lesson in the lugubrious game of cultural domination and downfall. See The Passenger – if your eyes can take the glare.

~ Tom Djll