the passenger…

I went along to the Watershed again this morning(!) to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic 1975 film ‘The Passenger’, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. I’d not seen the film before and, apart from knowing that it was an Antonioni (1912-2007) film about an arms dealer and featuring Jack Nicholson, that was the sum total of my knowledge (sorry!).
It’s an engrossing, somewhat haunting, ‘thriller’. Nicholson plays a disillusioned American reporter (covering the Chad civil war) who stumbles across a man’s corpse in an adjacent hotel room in the wilds of North Africa. He takes the opportunity to change identities with the dead man (as you do) in a quest to ‘start life over again’ (he hates his work, his wife is cheating on him etc etc).
Sadly, for him, passing himself off as someone else doesn’t mean he can escape his past… the man he’s impersonating turns out to be an arms dealer with connections to the rebels in the civil war.
Oh dear.
He ends up meeting up with a mysterious, young architectural student (played by Maria Schneider) – someone who seems almost as ‘lost’ as him. He persuades her (improbably in my view) to retrieve his luggage from his hotel room in Barcelona, they become lovers (of course) and he ends up explaining that he’d swapped identities with a dead man.
I suppose that when one is discussing a 44 year-old film, there is no need for ‘spoiler alerts’, but Schneider’s character and actions raised no end of questions in my mind (ok, you could just say that this was all part of the film’s psychological backdrop): Would she really have responded to Nicholson’s initial approach so willingly? Why was she sitting on a bench in a scene apparently filmed in Camden (was Antonioni simply just playing with us to see if we were concentrating?)? Accepting, without question, Nicholson’s instruction/suggestion after their car needed repair and jumping on a bus… but then immediately signing herself in to a hotel room (somehow knowing that Nicholson would end up there himself)… Really?
But, hey, maybe it’s just me…
Clearly, having been made in 1975, the film is somewhat dated… with a thin, young Nicholson - complete with Cuban heels, flared trousers and hair!
I found it a fascinating, engrossing film (Antonioni was clearly a brilliant director). It’s beautifully shot by Luciano Tovoli in France, Spain and North Africa and I particularly loved the final sequence (*spoiler alert*!): filmed, without dialogue, through the narrow bars of a hotel window to frame Nicholson… moving into a courtyard then moving back to look through the bars again. The first time we see Nicholson, he is alive. The second time he is dead! Oooh err! Quite brilliant!
Moral: arms dealing is bad for your health.
PS: There were a total of six of us in the audience – accommodated in the Watershed’s biggest cinema! One woman disappeared to the loo at a crucial point in the film and then disappeared again, never to return, just before the film’s final, brilliant conclusion. Hey ho!