(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. (more…)
