On the dvd commentary track to Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, recently released on Sony Picture Classics, both Jack Nicholson and writer Mark Peploe refer to the movie as an “art film”. I’m wondering when that term disappeared. I first saw The Passenger at the Kentucky Theater in downtown Lexington sometime around 1976. The Kentucky Theater was the prototypical “art house”. It was too big, too cold (or hot), with thick mildewed curtains. But it was cheap, and it had the films that any deep-thinking college kid who lacked the drive to change the world, but wanted to understand it better wanted to see. I pretty much went every weekend. Herzog, Fassbinder, and Wertmuller; Waters, Cassavettes, and Altman. Most of the films lived fondly in my memory for years. Many have turned up on dvd and have stayed in my top ten verified by repeated viewings. Stroczeck, Woman Under the Influence, The Last Detail, Days of Heaven. Some weren’t as good as I remembered. The Passenger was one of those films I would tell people about, but it remained elusive. When Nicholson finally took it off the shelf, allowing a transfer to dvd, I couldn’t wait to buy it, but I was nervous that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations and memories. All I remembered was that it had Maria Schneider and what I vaguely remembered as my favorite ending ever.
The film has almost no soundtrack. The shots are long with few cuts. Sand. Bugs on walls. The final shot of the film is a single take in which the camera actually leaves the room and circles around to look back inside the room. Apparently Antonioni had the hotel constructed so that he could part the window bars to accommodate the move. The plot finds Jack taking the opportunity to switch identities with a dead man. There are subtle clues into his motives, but nothing very obvious. An interview with an African “witch doctor” that turns the camera on journalist Nicholson gives you the idea that there is emptiness in his life. He is chased, but the “chase scene” is the least suspenseful chase ever filmed. This movie is the anti- Bourne. It takes its time. It is all psychology and observation. Even the love story has no romance. “What the fuck are you doing here with me?” Jack asks Maria. At the end you are left wondering who the “passenger” was, Maria or Jack. Did she set him up somehow, was he along for the ride; or was she indeed a student of architecture who ended up studying the decaying structure of a man who has seen too much ugliness in the world. He is an observer, and in the long run a dispassionate one.
So, what’s an art movie? I guess it’s one where you have to take your time to let it unfold, find ways to interpret it because not every question has been answered. The Passenger was as good as I remembered- no disappointments.
For a post- film palate cleanser try Iggy Pop’s, The Passenger, a song from the 1977 record Lust for Life. The lyrics don’t betray any homage toward Antonioni, but the la la la la la la la la’s will take you for an enjoyable ride.
For Cara:
“I bought a Gibson EB3 look-alike bass and Marlboro amp from J.C. Penneys with grass cutting money. I didn’t plan to be different. I wanted to be John Entwhistle. When I ran it through a cassette deck to get whale sounds and distorted feedback I had a feeling I was taking a different path.”
Now can I get my three bookmarks?
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