"Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger is a languid thriller in which not much seems to happen, beautifully. The protagonist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a weary journalist chasing rebels in Chad, on a seeming whim swaps identities with a similar looking fellow traveler Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill) he finds dead from a heart attack in their dusty hotel, after their previous evening’s drinking. Locke seeks to leave his old life behind ('I’ve run out of everything… Everything except a few bad habits I couldn’t get rid of.'), following a bread crumb trail of appointments in the other man’s diary across Europe, picking up a fellow passenger, 'The Girl' (Maria Schneider) along the way. ... This is a film where the language of cinema itself plays out the drama of the human mind, in which architecture and the daring use of cross-cutting from present to past tense in the same scene, can both illuminate and explore time, memory, identity, and the sense of freedom and entrapment that surround our passengers. ..."
Cinephilia & Beyond (Video/Audio)
2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2014 December: The Passenger (1975), 2017 April: Blow-Up (1966), 2017 October: L'Avventura (1960), 2017 December: La Notte (1961), 2018 February: L'Eclisse (1962)
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