(Quick note: This review, which takes the form of an essay, does contain spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen the film, you should.)

The Passenger, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)

In his time, Michelangelo Antonioni was a melancholic enfant terrible. L’Avventura caused impassioned boos at Cannes, while Zabriskie Point is now recognized as a hysterical mega-flop where everything laughable about European artistry converges with American 1960s kitsch. The Passenger, a film surrounded by noir conventions yet shot in blistering color in 1975 with Jack Nicholson as a man outrunning his own identity, has a strange reputation. On the one hand, the film saw Antonioni crawling out of the grave in which he’d been prematurely buried by the failure of Zabriskie Point (Nicholson met him half way, digging from the surface); on the other, he seemed to emerge weakened by his tribulations: gone was the force of his play with space, replaced by the speed and diligence of his camera. Antonioni himself, perhaps, was on the run.

Nicholson’s David Locke, a television reporter, is a character whose only interaction with reality is mediated through an external technology, much like the unnamed photographer in Blow-Up. When the film begins, he is in Africa, looking to interview someone controversial, someone who’ll make news. He goes to the desert, climbs the rocks. His car breaks down and he collapses into the sand, spreading his arms in both a gesture of acceptance and martyrdom.

Back at his hotel, he finds Robertson—a man with whom he’d previously shared nothing more than a drink—dead. He takes the opportunity to kill himself: he steals Robertson’s identity and assures that future authorities will discover that David Locke died in a small hotel in North Africa. Locke remembers his conversation with Robertson the previous evening. Antonioni takes us to a flashback, prompted by a brief recording Locke had made of the exchange. Here, the film’s narrative time and perspective become ambiguous: are we witness the event as remembered by Locke, the event as recorded by Locke, or the event as it happened (as the deception of the objective camera would suggest)? There are a few other moments like this throughout the film. They’re indicative both of a characteristic Antonioni ambiguity, and also of his ongoing interest in subjectivity. Yet more important is that such a gray zone is merely portrayed and not explored. Antonioni himself runs from the opportunity to explore a subject into which he’d once been so eager to dive.

From then on, Locke lives only by the appointments in Robertson’s date book: he is in perpetual movement, back to Europe, travelling to England, Germany, and finally Spain. His only joy is in watching everything vanish behind him. Yet it is important to note that Locke’s new identity is not a liberation. Instead, it is a fulfillment.  Locke’s life before he “trades in” his identity wasn’t so different from the life he attains: he was always on the move, never settled down. He had a job then, but when he takes Robertson’s life he takes Robertson’s job, too: he runs guns to North African rebels. When Locke becomes Robertson, he isn’t breaking free; he’s just going farther, moving as everything fades behind him.

Robertson's date book.

In Barcelona he meets a woman. She may or may not betray him at the end of the film. It plays into the film noir conventions Antonioni must have had to use in order to get the film made: a man on the run, a beautiful woman, agents close behind him. Since L’Avventura, though, Antonioni had shown himself as interested only in noir conventions that dissolve completely, which makes you wonder why anyone thought he would be wholeheartedly interested in them now. He isn’t, yet these generic tropes circle around the periphery of the film, ever preventing it from becoming completely Antonioni’s.

Locke meets this woman in Gaudí’s Casa Milà. Here, Antonioni proves himself less interested in using his camera to create interesting space and more interested merely in portraying bizarre spaces. Barcelona could have provided Antonioni with inspiration to make five films. Instead, he chooses to leave it as soon as possible: Locke and the woman drive away from the city, and the camera shows us the road disappearing behind them Like the familiar theme of subjectivity throughout Antonioni’s work, his interest in space emerges only briefly, only to be abandoned.

At the end of the film, Locke’s running catches up to him—and Antonioni’s, too. In the film’s final shot, the camera—seemingly detached from anything—moves forwards, through the bars of a window, and eventually (at the moment, we understand, of his death) breaks through those bars. In death he reaches the natural conclusion of his constant running: if the only pleasure is in smiling as the distance between you and the world increases, then death is what you’re driving towards.

The shot unites Antonioni’s interests in subjectivity (the camera briefly takes becomes Locke’s own soul) and space (as represented within the geography of the room). Thus it is expiation not only for Locke, but for Antonioni as well. It is a culmination and a death: it unites all of Antonioni’s previous interests, from which he’d been fleeing throughout the film. Yet it brings about a more serious death than the ruin of Zabriskie Point. That film is still remembered. Nothing after The Passenger exists when one speaks of Antonioni. His running caught up to him. When, at the end of The Passenger, Antonioni’s real interests catch up to him—and not just his pseudo-interest in this kind of free form film noir—he vanishes before our very eyes.