The Passenger (1975 film)

The Passenger (Italian: Professione: reporter) is a film directed and co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni, released in 1975, in which Jack Nicholson stars as a television reporter in Africa who assumes the identity of a dead stranger. The film competed for the "Palme d'Or" award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.^[1]

Plot

David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a television journalist making a documentary film on post-colonial Africa. To finish the film, he is in the Sahara desert seeking to meet with and interview rebel fighters involved in Chad's civil war. Struggling to find rebels to interview, his frustrations reach a climax when his Land Rover gets hopelessly stuck on a sand dune. After a long walk through the desert back to his hotel a thoroughly glum Locke finds that an Englishman by the name of Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), who has also been staying there and with whom he had struck up a friendship, is dead. Tired of his work, his marriage and his life, Locke switches identities with Robertson, carefully cutting and swapping the photographs in their passports. Posing as Robertson, he reports his own death; since the hotel manager has already mistaken Locke for Robertson, the plan goes off without a hitch.

In London, Locke's wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) has been having an affair with someone else but is guilt-ridden and torn by the news of her husband's death and tries to get in touch with Robertson, to learn more about what happened. Meanwhile "Robertson" (Locke) flies to Europe with the dead man's appointment book.

Otherwise aimless, Locke swiftly learns Robertson was a gunrunner for the rebels he had been trying to contact in the desert and not liked by the government they are fighting to overthrow. Meanwhile a friend of Locke's from the BBC, a producer, tries to track Robertson down on behalf of Rachel. Locke spots him on the street in Barcelona and asks an architecture student (Maria Schneider as the Girl) to fetch his belongings so he won't be seen at his hotel. She and Locke drive off from Barcelona and become romantically close, Locke confesses that he has stolen a dead man's identity as an explanation for his secrecy.

Flush with cash from a down payment on arms he accepted but cannot deliver, with encouragement from the Girl, Locke nevertheless is drawn to keep the meetings listed in Robertson's book in an attempt to adopt a second identity which is temporarily exciting realizing that one day he must go into hiding. Locke begins skirting then fleeing from the Spanish police, whom Rachel has brought in on the search for Robertson, but the Girl is loyal and helps him evade them, providing rational advice.

An ever more wary and world-weary Locke sends the Girl away on a bus, saying he'll meet her in Tangiers later. The thugs eventually catch up with him at the Hotel de la Gloria after he sends her away with a grim story of a blind man who regains his sight only to commit suicide,^[2] in a Spanish town (Osuna, province of Seville). The assassination takes place off screen in a widely noted, seven minute long take-tracking shot which begins in a hotel room, travels out into a dusty parking area and tracks back into the hotel room.^[3] All significant living characters are present in the last minutes of the movie as Locke's identity is confirmed in the presence of the Girl.

Cast

• Jack Nicholson... David Locke
• Maria Schneider... Girl
• Steven Berkoff... Stephen
• Ian Hendry... Martin Knight
• Jenny Runacre... Rachel Locke
• Ambroise Bia... Achebe
• Charles Mulvehill... David Robertson

Penultimate shot

The film's penultimate shot consists of a seven minute long take-tracking shot which begins in Locke's hotel room looking out into a dusty, run-down square, pulls out through the bars in the hotel window into the square, rotates 180 degrees, and finally tracks back into the hotel room.^[2]

• The location of the hotel is stated to be Osuna in the film. However, the bullring at the edge of the square is recognisably that of the one in the Spanish town of Vera, in the province of Almería.^[4][5] In a DVD commentary, decades later, Nicholson said Antonioni built the entire hotel so as to get this widely noted shot.
• Since the shot was continuous, it was not possible to adjust the lens aperture as the camera left the room and went into the square. Hence the footage had to be taken in the very late afternoon near dusk, in order to minimise the lighting contrast between the brightness outside and that in the room.

• The square was windy and the crew needed stillness to ensure smooth camera movement. Antonioni tried putting the camera in a sphere so the wind might catch it less, but this wouldn't fit through the window. In the scene it appears that the bars may have been adjusted to be removed as the camera approached them.

• The camera ran on a ceiling track in the hotel room and when it came outside the window, was meant to be picked up by a hook suspended from a giant crane nearly thirty metres high. A system of gyroscopes was fitted on the camera to steady it during the switch from this smooth indoor track to the crane outside. Meanwhile the bars on the window had been given hinges. When the camera reached the window and the bars were no longer in the field of view they were swung away to either side. At this time the camera's forward movement had to stop for a few seconds as the crane's hook grabbed onto it and took over from the track. To hide this, the lens was slowly and smoothly zoomed until the crane could pull the camera forward again.^{[Note 1]} Antonioni directed the scene from a van by means of monitors and microphones, talking to assistants who communicated his instructions to the actors and operators.

Although it is often referred to as the "final shot" of the film, there is one more, which shows a small driving school car pulling away in the twilight some time later, holding on the hotel as the credits begin to roll.

Reception

The Passenger has been considered remarkable for its camerawork by Luciano Tovoli and acting. While the movie has been critically praised by such movie critics as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, it has also been criticized by Roger Ebert, Danny Peary and others for being slow-moving and pretentious. Ebert has since changed his stance on the film, and now considers it a perceptive look at identity, alienation, and mankind's desire to escape oneself.

References

Notes

1. ^ Only a year later (1976) the wholly portable Steadicam, which uses a counterweight system rather than gyroscopes, would become available for this kind of shot, greatly simplifying such setups.

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Arrowsmith, William; Ted Perry (1995). Antonioni: The Poet of Images. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195092708. 
• Chatman, Seymour (1985). Antonioni: Or, the surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520053419. 

External links

• The Passenger's Official Site at Sony Pictures
• The Passenger at the Internet Movie Database
• The Passenger at Metacritic
• The Passenger Meets History, by Robert Koehler
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. SlantMagazine.com
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times, 11/04/2005
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 10/28/2005
• Roger Ebert's review of The Passenger
• Turner, Jack (1999). Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text. Other Voices 1 (3).
• The Passenger Fan Page