February 1975 welcomed the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. An international production (it was filmed on location in Germany, Spain, England and Algeria), The Passenger is nevertheless a New Hollywood landmark. (Beyond the essential imprint of the French New Wave on the New Hollywood, other European auteurs were enormous influences as well, Antonioni notable among them. The success of his groundbreaking Blow-Up (1966), released on the eve of the revolution, not only hammered one of the final nails in the coffin of the Production Code Administration, it was also an essential influence on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.)
If very European in pedigree and sensibility (and pacing), to our eyes The Passenger takes its place as the final entry in what we have dubbed Nicholson’s “alienation trilogy,” following Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Indeed, although the two films are markedly dissimilar in terms of nominal plot, character and milieu, nevertheless it is easy to see (in fact, once said, impossible not to see) The Passenger as a radical reimagination of Five Easy Pieces—if one that is, somehow, even more despairing. A crucial difference is that in the earlier film, Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea had struggled throughout his adult life to find success and fit in, yet in Antonioni’s production, David Locke is a successful international journalist of some repute. He is also, it would seem, a much more decent fellow. That David cannot find redemption suggests a more universal existential crisis.
Ultimately, however, both the admirable, accomplished professional and the itinerant, mean spirited, one-time child of plausible promise are trying to do the same thing—somehow shed their own skin. As Jackson Browne lamented, “No matter how fast I run/I can never seem to get away from me.” Five Easy Pieces shows the futility of this flight—The Passenger takes it up a notch. Or two. “It’s us who remain the same. We translate every situation, every experience into the same old codes,” Locke insists, dissenting from the jaded, same-old, same-old perspective of a similarly globe-trotting acquaintance in a remote Saharan village. “However hard you try, it stays so difficult to get away from your own habits.”
Well, when said acquaintance drops dead, given the more than passing similarity of their shapes and features, Locke takes the opportunity to . . . switch identities, becoming Robertson: slipping into his shoes, lifting his passport (he swaps the photos), and, most fatefully, making off with his appointment book. All this, it would seem (here the London interlude is essential) with little concern for those who might mourn the loss of Locke (Jenny Runacre and Ian Hendry turn in fine supporting turns as those who were closest to him). David again hits the road, falling in with an enigmatic, unnamed woman (Schneider). Is she part of some larger scheme? We think not, but the movie more than invites conspiratorial hypothesizing, or at the very least insists on some comfort level with synchronicity. In any event, ruh-roh, it soon becomes evident that Robertson’s life had its own, shall we say, complications.
Manohla Dargis praised The Passenger as “arguably Mr. Antonioni’s greatest film”—and we agree, and feel compelled to point out that is pretty, pretty high praise. (Nicholson went out of his way to personally secure the rights to the movie, suggesting that he also holds it in high esteem.) Dargis adds “that few filmmakers have revealed so much beauty inside a film frame,” and that The Passenger “dazzles from first shot to last.” Which is perhaps the case, but I want to talk about two sequences in particular, which do even more than dazzle. The first, which I think is still underappreciated, is the bravura twelve-plus minute sequence, early in the film (it starts around minute fourteen, for those of you playing our home game), after Locke discovers Robertson’s body. With the exception, in voice-over, of some exchanges from a previously recorded conversation between the two men, the sequence is entirely dialogue-free. Antonioni, without showing off, orchestrates this narrative, bringing together images and sounds, framing impeccably, shooting with confidence, cutting virtuosically, and bending time. Nicholson, compelling, holds the screen without speaking. What do we want from the movies? This.
That said, one reason the Robertson swap sequence doesn’t get the love it deserves, is because so much praise has been (justly) showered on the astonishing, how was that even possible, narratively essential, seven minute shot that comes near the very end of the story. It is one of the great long takes in the history of cinema. And it doesn’t even step on the toes of what might have seemed like a throwaway line, but well summarizes a film that is on the one hand intensely suspenseful, but on the other has a lot to say about little things like perspective, subjectivity, and identity: “I never knew him.”
