I Used to Be Someone Else but I Traded Him In
Antonioni's THE PASSENGER and the art of outrunning yourself
It’s been said that Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film THE PASSENGER is a languid thriller in which not much seems to happen, beautifully. Much of Antonioni's work points implicitly in the direction of the spiritual — his disdain for riches, his portrayals of personal pain among the glittering surfaces of the privileged.
In this wondrous anti-action film, it’s as though everything happens in the in-between — a moment that usually wouldn’t be on camera ends up taking center stage and speaking to the poetry of life.
David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a world-weary American journalist who has been sent to cover a conflict in northern Africa, but he makes little progress with the story. When he discovers the body of a stranger who looks similar to him, Locke assumes the dead man's identity. However, he soon finds out that the man was an arms dealer, leading Locke into dangerous situations. Aided by a beautiful woman (Maria Schneider), Locke attempts to avoid both the police and criminals out to get him.
The plot sounds a lot like an action packed thriller, but it’s not. “There are people who find this a very pretentious, implausible existential thriller,” wrote critic David Thomson. “I think it is one of the greatest films ever made… a thriller, a mystery, and a sweet, faintly sinister parable on being so loose or free to let the vehicle of narrative, or of film running through the projector, carry you away.”
I fondly remember the first time I saw this striking scene below that happens near the opening of the film. The anguished cry and kick of the vehicle is all too human, but it was the long, empty pan to the desert that doesn’t care that made me sit upright and wonder at what I was watching.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the film I love more or the idea of the film. The concept of starting afresh, reinventing yourself only to realize you can never outrun yourself is something I think we all live with in different ways. It speaks to what makes us who we are, the things you can’t leave behind and of defining ourselves. My admiration only grew when I read William Arrowsmith’s famous book Antonioni: The Poet Of Images, that covers this film and all of Antonioni’s others in amazing detail.
From Antonioni’s 1975 production notes:
“In this journalist (Locke) there coexists the drive to excel, to produce quality work, and the feeling that this quality is ephemeral. The feeling thus, that his work is valid for a fleeting moment only. In fact, no one can better understand such a feeling than a film director, since we are working with a material, the film stock itself, which is ephemeral as such, which is physically short-lived. Time consumes it. In my film, when Jack (Nicholson) feels saturated to the gills with this sentiment, after years of work, with age, a moment arrives when there is a break in his inner armor when he feels the need for a personal revolution.”
I’ve unashamedly stolen many moments from this film for my own work— from the exchange at the roadside cafe to the moment of Locke burning his belongings gleefully in his front yard. But none more than the iconic moment when Locke is driving down the Spanish countryside in an open top convertible, Maria Schneider by his side. She asks him what he’s running away from, and he cryptically says, “turn your back to the front seat.” Saying things with images is what cinema does that other art forms don’t, and his moment captures the wonder of that feeling perfectly.
A gift of a film if there ever was.
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