The Passenger (1975)
This will bore the soul out of a lot of people. In a way, it's supposed to. Or rather, it will only appeal to those who are somehow as drifting and disenchanted as the lead character here. (If not literally, then culturally, aesthetically.) For them it will perhaps be transfixing.
Jack Nicholson plays a fabulously indifferent, tired, and increasingly detached and frustrated reporter in the African desert. It's as if, like Paul Bowles and others who leave the comforts of Europe or America, he finds that life is in fact has a different kind of meaning. Nicholson in fact then seems to accept that all is meaningless, and he finds a comfort in admitting it, in succumbing, and so he does.
The famous switching of identities is meant to set him free from those things he hates about his job and the world it has created around him. What replaces it is different and at first liberating, but ultimately he finds his roads narrowing and his anxiety, ever bottled, gets to him. There are a number of moral analogies to draw here, but none are satisfying without leaving the others also viable. What I mean is, the open-endedness of so much of the movie, despite the very closed ending, is the essence of its meaning.
My sense of Antonioni begins with his famous trilogy (1960-62), first and most all with "L'Avventura." In a way, the idea there is similar--people are drawn by circumstance into a new existence by lack of better choices, nothing more, and all is well by not caring too much. The past is forgotten. The future doesn't matter. What "The Passenger" lacks for me is the atmosphere, the poetic flow of the earlier movies. Maybe that means this one is more realistic, less about movie versions of listlessness and temporal joys. Maybe this really is the best of the director's varied and often amazing output.
And I loved it on some level. Maybe I'm just a lot older, but when I saw "L'Avventura" (and I similarly "L'Eclisse") I was moved and actually changed. It really affected me. Here I was drawn in and liked it all but without transformation. The celebrated long take at the end required some intricate set design (the motel in the last scene is all artificial, and comes apart and reassembles out of sight for the camera), and it's one of the highlights of the movie if not the astonishment others say it is.
If you like taut, quiet, searching films, especially European style, this deserves a good look. It's tightly calculated even if it seems, on the surface, slow and meandering. A very different thing going on here than the common norm today, even among art films. Worth a deliberate, absorbing viewing.
This will bore the soul out of a lot of people. In a way, it's supposed to. Or rather, it will only appeal to those who are somehow as drifting and disenchanted as the lead character here. (If not literally, then culturally, aesthetically.) For them it will perhaps be transfixing.
Jack Nicholson plays a fabulously indifferent, tired, and increasingly detached and frustrated reporter in the African desert. It's as if, like Paul Bowles and others who leave the comforts of Europe or America, he finds that life is in fact has a different kind of meaning. Nicholson in fact then seems to accept that all is meaningless, and he finds a comfort in admitting it, in succumbing, and so he does.
The famous switching of identities is meant to set him free from those things he hates about his job and the world it has created around him. What replaces it is different and at first liberating, but ultimately he finds his roads narrowing and his anxiety, ever bottled, gets to him. There are a number of moral analogies to draw here, but none are satisfying without leaving the others also viable. What I mean is, the open-endedness of so much of the movie, despite the very closed ending, is the essence of its meaning.
My sense of Antonioni begins with his famous trilogy (1960-62), first and most all with "L'Avventura." In a way, the idea there is similar--people are drawn by circumstance into a new existence by lack of better choices, nothing more, and all is well by not caring too much. The past is forgotten. The future doesn't matter. What "The Passenger" lacks for me is the atmosphere, the poetic flow of the earlier movies. Maybe that means this one is more realistic, less about movie versions of listlessness and temporal joys. Maybe this really is the best of the director's varied and often amazing output.
And I loved it on some level. Maybe I'm just a lot older, but when I saw "L'Avventura" (and I similarly "L'Eclisse") I was moved and actually changed. It really affected me. Here I was drawn in and liked it all but without transformation. The celebrated long take at the end required some intricate set design (the motel in the last scene is all artificial, and comes apart and reassembles out of sight for the camera), and it's one of the highlights of the movie if not the astonishment others say it is.
If you like taut, quiet, searching films, especially European style, this deserves a good look. It's tightly calculated even if it seems, on the surface, slow and meandering. A very different thing going on here than the common norm today, even among art films. Worth a deliberate, absorbing viewing.