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
what's ridiculous is that zabriskie point is unavailable. dorks round the globe cite blow-up as some sort of incredible masterpiece and this flick gets completely shunned, even though IMO it's got much more lasting re-watchable value and the soundtrack is EGGSELENT! Gotta love the Youngbloods!
Posted by: unwrinkled at March 31, 2006 4:13 PMAgreed, Andrew - and even more to be regretted because the OST doesn't include the Rolling Stones track. Don't think it's all that dorkish to rave about Blow Up, but like you I prefer ZP - and isn't it odd that perhaps the two most perceptive views of late 60s USA and Swinging London were made by an Italian!
Posted by: Dan Warburton at April 1, 2006 8:27 AMThanks for the insightful review, Tom. I hadn't put it in the context of colonialism.
This is an excellent movie. I rank it very high on my short list (that is, of movies I actually like).
Posted by: clifford at April 1, 2006 12:20 PMI saw ZP maybe 15 years ago and maybe I didn't get it. I thought the "actress" playing the young woman, and the dialogue in general, was unbelievably bad. Was there some point in that I missed? And (smirk) I'm close enough that I can visit the real Zabriskie Point any weekend I want (so of course I never go) so I don't have to look at a movie of it...(it's been raining gangbusters here in Calif for weeks now, very unusual... I went after the rains last year and got some great photos. It should be a truly amazing desert bloom this year!!!)
I just had the opportunity to watch The Constant Gardener last night, and it makes an obvious thematic point of comparison. Interesting that it portrays the young activist wife as impossibly heart-on-her-sleeve to the point where you lose sympathy for her. But the movie itself ended up annoying me in the same way. In the end it's pretty conventional, and doesn't really concern itself with the African point of view, as it wants you to believe it does. It's just entertainment.
Posted by: djll at April 1, 2006 2:51 PMTom - I fell asleep watching The Constant Gardener on PPV about a month ago. From the first half an hour I saw, I didn't find any character I could actually identify with. Having said that, my question is, should I re-watch the film? Is it worth my time?
"I saw ZP maybe 15 years ago and maybe I didn't get it. I thought the "actress" playing the young woman, and the dialogue in general, was unbelievably bad."
What did you expect from a Californian teenager? Fuckin Shakespeare??! Having a go at that film for the quality of its screenplay is about a daft as criticising The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for not being Ingmar Bergman, or moaning that Citizen Kane doesn't have enough car chases. It also makes you sound like a horrible snob, Tom, which I don't think you are. FWIW I think Daria Halprin's performance is magnificently fresh, unpretentious. But I agree that the film tends to polarise opinions; like Two Lane Blacktop and Easy Rider, you either love it or you hate it.
"(smirk) I'm close enough that I can visit the real Zabriskie Point any weekend I want"
WHAAAT? I thought you lived in the bloody Bay Area, Djll! At my calculations it'd take you a whole day's drive to get there (it took us two days from SF to Death Valley last time we were there, though that was via Monterey and with a stopover in King City).
"(so of course I never go)"
Your choice, mate. If I lived within driving distance of Death Valley I'd be there every day; it's one of the world's most magnificent landscapes
"so I don't have to look at a movie of it..."
I trust you've got your tongue planted firmly in your cheek here, because if it not I'd be inclined to fly over there and slap it out.. That's like me saying, oh fuck it, I'll just give up on Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Bresson, Melville (not to mention anyone of ten zillion films shot in France) because I can visit the places any time I want..! Gimme a break!
Talking of visits - and sorry, Joe, to indulge yet again in blatant self-publicity, I've had a few mails regarding the latest issue of Paris Transatlantic to the effect that on some machines the page seems to be too big to fit the screen, and that the background has mysteriously changed to a different shade of green. This doesn't happen on my machine, but if by chance you've visited the April issue and find that that's the case, could you do me a huge favour and email PTEditor@aol.com and tell me what kind of machine and which browser you're using. That way our webmeister might be able to get an idea as to what's gone wrong, because at the moment he hasn't got a clue.
It's also (as Wallace would say), a cracking good read, and for high culture vultures like you Tom there's even a picture of Harry Potter. No shit.
@ Dangm W. - Ifm myh tongumm wz plnntd nn myh chkkyh Ihh woulnnd bhh ablnmn toohh playmm th trmmpt. Ofv courz sommhn mpleaophhle syy Ihh cannd plyhh nnyway.
Posted by: djll at April 2, 2006 11:25 AMI rarely see anybody mention Two Lane Blacktop. Great film. But I digress...
Of course "place" is subjective. I lived in Topeka, Kansas for the first eighteen years of my life, but I would still want to see a film studying that landscape because it would offer something entirely different from my own experience. Duh.
I see the tongue-in-cheek point, but I also see its inverse. Frightening, no?
Posted by: clifford at April 2, 2006 2:41 PMNow I understand why your albums sound they way they do ;-)
Posted by: Dan Warburton at April 2, 2006 9:43 PMSomeone mentioned The Constant Gardener. Awful, awful, awful film. Embarassingly bad; inept bordering offensive. Made me quite angry. I almost heckled the screen.
It's great news about The Passenger. There was an Antonioni season at the NFT here in London recenty and it was going to be screened. But, for bizarre contractual reasons, it could only be screened if Antonioni himself was present (?!?!) Sadly twas not to be.
Posted by: matt at April 5, 2006 2:41 AM>>Someone mentioned The Constant Gardener. Awful, awful, awful film. Embarassingly bad; inept bordering offensive. Made me quite angry. I almost heckled the screen.
Posted by: Richard Harland Smith at April 7, 2006 9:39 AMI cited the quote above by way of asking the poster if he could be specific about how THE CONSTANT GARDNER failed for him. I enjoyed the movie, which seemed to me to be a good potboiler/mystery with a bit more on its plate than one usually sees and I particularly liked Rachel Weiss' performance as someone I probably wouldn't like in real life, which seems to me to be as good a testament to the craft of acting as I can imagine.
Posted by: Richard Harland Smith at April 7, 2006 9:42 AMRichard,
My own feeling about The Constant Gardener was that while the acting wasn't bad, the script is a bunch of neoliberal tripe. It takes some genuinely agonizing conditions of 3rd world people and Western exploitation of them and basically turns the whole mess into a cheap, exploitative potboiler. It doesn't really address the issues, chiefly because it uses the Africans just as props in the story. We don't see their point of view, we just see how bad off they are. It amounts to little more than slumming for modern-day cultural crusaders, dripping with noblesse oblige hidden under a thick, stinking skin of liberal guilt. I believe the term is "white man's burden." There's very little psychological depth to the Westerner characters either, they're little more than well-defined types we've seen before.
And the 'avant-garde' camera work feels like the director is saying 'ooh look how cinema-verite I made this.'
It was mostly annoying for me. I'll let matt handle his comments...
Posted by: djll at April 7, 2006 10:53 AMAlthough I've read about the problems of modern-day Africa in the press, I thought THE CONSTANT GARDENER did a fair job of rendering the situation within the context of a thriller, which is what the film is above everything else. I thought there was considerable depth to the principal characters played by Ray Fiennes, Rachel Weiz and Danny Huston, so much so that I was able to see all their points of view and, to varying degrees, empathize with them.
And as for the white man's burden, you'll remember the hew and cry when Norman Jewison was announced as the director of MALCOM X. It was declared that a white director couldn't possibly do the story justice, and so the project went to Spike Lee, who turned in a staid, respectable biopic that anyone else might have tendered. So it seems a kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't proposition for whites to tell stories about non-whites. And of course the filmmaker in question in this case is non-white, if not black.
Posted by: Richard Harland Smith at April 12, 2006 11:02 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................