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| 2005 NYFF Films Introduction Good Night, and Good Luck Regular Lovers The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Methadonia L'Enfant (The Child) Bubble The Squid and the Whale I Am Capote Something Like Happiness Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Manderlay Tale of Cinema Breakfast on Pluto Through the Forest The President's Last Bang Who's Camus Anyway? Three Times Paradise Now Tristram Shandy Gabrielle The Sun The Passenger Cache (Hidden) | The
Passenger Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy / USA / France, 1975, 126 min.  Thirty years later, Michelangelo Antonioni's re-released The Passenger is looking very good, and so are Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, as the journalist who takes a dead man's identity in the Sahara and the girl he meets in Barcelona who decides to tag along. David Locke (Nicholson) takes the passport of a man named Robertson who he's had a few drinks with in a hotel. Before that we see Locke experience frustration, giving away cigarettes to men in turbans who say nothing, abandoned by a boy guide, dumping a Land Rover stuck in the sand. Later we see films that show as a journalist he was subservient to bad men. Locke has Robertson's appointment book which leads him to Munich, then various points in Spain. He learns Robertson was a committed man taking risks: he sold arms to revolutionaries whose causes he thought were just. He gets a huge down payment. Then Locke's wife gets a tape of him talking to Robertson and his passport with Robertson's photo pasted into it -- and she gets the picture. Changing your identity and using someone else's isn't just an existential act, it's also a criminal one. Locke's gambit is hopeless: he winds up fleeing from himself. The film skillfully gives its action story an existential underpining. The chase keeps up a rapid pace, like the Bourne franchise, but it has time to contemplate Locke's old and new lives in a metaphorical story he tells Schneider about a blind man that explains how he ends up. Antonioni is great at little incidentals -- a girl chewing bubblegum, a man reciting in a Gaudi building. And at the end, people coming and going in a desolate plaza outside a bullfighting amphitheater in the film's famous long final shot where the climactic moment is not seen. The locations provide exotic glamor. The camerawork of course is wonderful. In retrospect now one can see this was definitely a culmination for Antonioni. He thought it technically his best film. This is the director's preferred European version, originally released as Professione: Reporter. The Festival jury was absolutely right to draw our attention back to this masterpiece. (Chris Knipp) |
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