The Passenger

Earlier this month the death of Clare Peploe was announced in the news. I knew her name because of her association with two Italian filmmakers, one great (Michelangelo Antonioni), the other not (Bernardo Bertolucci). She was romantically involved with them both (she married Bertolucci in 1978), which would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that, post-Peploe, Antonioni’s work fell off a cliff and Bertolucci’s went from bad (1900) to worse (La Luna). 

In Carlo Ponti’s Guardian obituary, John Francis Lane wrote: “Under an agreement with MGM, Ponti produced three English-speaking films by Michelangelo Antonioni, two of which are among the director's best works, Blow Up (1966) and The Passenger (1975). The third film, Zabriskie Point (1970), shot in the US, was not well received but has since acquired a cult following.” Lane was being far too kind to both Ponti and Antonioni. Zabriskie Point was the second instalment in Antonioni’s three-picture deal with MGM. It was a confused mess in 1970 when it was released and time has certainly been unkind to Antonioni’s infatuation with 60s youth culture. 

Clare Peploe is credited with co-writing Zabriskie Point, along with Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Fred Gardner, and Sam Shepard. Clare’s brother, Mark Peploe, Antonioni and Peter Wollen are credited with the script of The Passenger, Antonioni’s last film for MGM. Zabriskie Point was an artistic and commercial disaster. The Passenger was, in one sense, even worse than Zabriskie Point in that it could easily be mistaken for a thriller. Genre is where artists go when they die. 

Evidently, Antonioni’s collaborators on The Passenger noticed that two of his best films – L’Avventura and Blow-Up – contained an unresolved central mystery: Anna’s disappearance in the former and a possible murder in the latter. So in The Passenger the protagonist, David Locke, a journalist who is in North Africa to make contact with a rebel leader, discovers that a man named Robertson in the next room has died of a preexisting heart problem and, for no apparent reason (job frustration? The Saharan heat?), Locke takes Robertson’s passport, switches their photos, takes Robertson’s appointment book and leaves the hotel. Locke/Robertson informs the confused management that Locke is the dead man. 

Sporting a (fake) moustache, after a brief visit to his – Locke’s – home in London to retrieve some documents from a locked box (when no one else is there), he follows Robertson’s itinerary to Munich and an airport locker containing a weapons invoice. Two of his “contacts” are there, but he doesn’t notice them. They follow Locke to a Bavarian church and approach him after a wedding ceremony to get the papers from him and pay him the first instalment. Robertson, it turns out, was a gun runner. His next meeting is in Barcelona, but they warn him that government agents of the African state could be on to him. 

Next stop, Barcelona. Locke takes in some of the sights, including a cable car ride in which he leans out of the window and flaps his arms like he’s flying (looks like James Cameron borrowed the idea for Titanic). Meanwhile one of the rebel contacts is captured and beaten up. And Locke’s wife discovers that the dead man isn’t him. Thereafter, in a real and incalculably sad way, The Passenger becomes a – highly uncommon – chase movie. Locke sees a friend, Martin, on a Barcelona street and, trying to hide from him, he runs into a woman – the same woman he made eye contact with in London. She is an architecture student engaged in studying Antoni Gaudi’s work. We are shown more of Gaudi’s strange playground architecture. The Girl (she is otherwise unidentified) tells Locke the story of Gaudí’s sad death. With Martin hot on his trail, Locke decides to leave Barcelona. The Girl accompanies him to a sleepy village hotel where, it turns out, Locke has an appointment. The penultimate seven-and-a-half minute single shot, involving a camera, gyroscopes and a crane, was as mysteriously pulled off as Locke’s death. All the relevant personages are there – the African government agents, Locke’s wife Rachel (who fails to identify her husband), and the Girl (who says she knew him – whoever “he” was). As others noted at the time, Antonioni was fond of wordless, ambiguous endings. This one disappoints only because everything that came before it doesn’t deserve it. If only the rest of the film had been as meticulously and seamlessly planned, staged, and shot. (1)

One of the only advantages the film has is Antonioni’s unerring eye for a fetching shot. Luciano Tovoli, the film’s DP, got a lot of praise, but he failed to mention that he was only acting as Antonioni’s third eye. 

Antonioni never communicated well with his actors, especially male actors. Look at Marcello Mastroianni’s undistinguished performance in La Notte (opposite Jeanne Moreau’s smoldering performance). Jack Nicholson does what he can with an impossibly-written role, but he looks and sounds completely out of place. Nicholson worked very hard to salvage The Passenger and re-release it. His commentary on the DVD is invaluable and highly reverential of Antonioni. (2)

As for his actresses, Antonioni had an obvious weakness for pronounced jawlines: Monica Vitti, Vanessa Redgrave, and now Jenny Runacre, who plays Locke’s wife Rachel. Maria Schneider seems disengaged throughout the enterprise and her thickly-accented English isn’t helped by the ponderous pretentiousness of the dialogue. It is at times thuddingly banal. But look out for an extremely rare – albeit weak – attempt at humor. In the Bavarian church, when Locke counts the money in the envelope he exclaims, “Jesus Christ!” Remembering where he is, he adds, “Sorry!” 

Another thing Antonioni doesn’t handle well is politics. He may have believed it was safe to deal with something as arcane as an African insurgency, but he includes a quite gratuitous piece of film in which a political prisoner is executed by firing squad, with the prisoner’s body twitching violently at the impact of each bullet. We are shown the film on a Moviola screen, on which Locke’s friend Martin is editing it. Apparently (and this is confirmed by IMDB), the execution wasn’t staged but is an actual event. How Antonioni expected us to react to the filmed execution is impossible to tell, but it reminds me of something Orwell wrote: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.” 

Finally, Antonioni’s downfall may have been attended by nothing more than poor writers of English. The English dramatist Edward Bond wrote the dialogue for Blow-Up. While it isn’t scintillating, it is functional. Nobody talks nonsense or unnaturally, like they do in Zabriskie Point and The Passenger. Efforts had been made to entice Fellini and Bergman, among others, away from their native countries and languages and make English language films. When Antonioni left Italy to fulfil the terms of his MGM contract, his peers must have seen it as the enormous risk – to his art – that it eventually proved to be. He wasn’t just leaving his native country and native language behind – he was forsaking his ethos, his frame of reference, his whole artistic world. He had made films outside Italy before: I Vinti had segments filmed in France and in England. Antonioni should've seen it as a warning. Only the Italian episode worked (even if Antonioni was forced to re-shoot some of its scenes). 

In 1968, Vernon Young seemed to foretell Antonioni’s fate: "Antonioni’s L’Avventura is unbroken witness to the catastrophe that ineluctably overcomes the man who is cut off – from his family, from his fellows, from himself."(3)

(1) A fascinating article devoted exclusively to the hotel room shot can be found here. 

(2) The version I watched was the expanded 126 minute version.

(3) “Our Local Idioms,” On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972)