Ambiguous clues point to a murder having taken place, and a photographer sets out to establish if it has. A young man, sought by the police for his involvement in a campus protest which has erupted into violence, steals an airplane to make his getaway. A man assumes the identity of another man who died, and finds himself enmeshed in a web of intrigue and gunrunning. These mystery-thriller plots (the last even includes an auto chase) are, of course, not from Hitchcock movies (though the first sounds exactly like Rear Window) but those of the last three fiction films—Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger—of Michelangelo Antonioni, celebrated purveyor of plotless ennui. To be sure, these films do stand apart from Antonioni’s previous work, but not, I think, for reasons of their plottedness. By one of those chance occurrences which seem to govern the distribution of films, Antonioni’s first feature film, Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un Amore, 1950), is being released in this country at the same time as his latest, and it turns out to be a story (I rely on the description of others, since I haven’t seen it) of an adulterous couple who plan a murder.
Ought one to be surprised? A young woman disappears, and her lover and her closest female friend join in a search for her. What I’m describing might be the plot of Psycho (but for the fact that, in Psycho, the lover is joined by the missing woman’s sister); in fact, it is that of L’Avventura, the film which introduced Antonioni to an American audience, and permanently earned him his reputation as either a heroically inaccessible leader of the avant-garde or a pretentiously attitudinizing herald of alienation, obscurity, and boredom. Writing of L’Avventura at the time of its release I noted that “The narrative has all the immediate appeal of a good mystery, evoking, quite properly, all of the mystery’s appropriate questions: Where is she? Will she be found?” What is surprising is not so much the extent to which the Antonioni of The Passenger is using the same kind of plot as the Antonioni of L’Avventura, but the extent to which he’s using the same plot: still using a plot whose action hinges on a “missing person.”
How is this plot used in The Passenger? At the outset, we find the film’s protagonist, David Locke, a well-known television reporter engaged in preparing a documentary on Africa, in some remote country where he’s trying without success to make contact with a force of guerrillas. Natives look through him as though he were invisible, guides unpredictably present themselves and just as mysteriously vanish; finally, his vehicle stuck in the sand, he’s abandoned in the desert, and, one feels, at the end of his rope. He returns to the primitive hotel at which he’s quartered and discovers the other European (Robertson, a businessman, also named David) who’s been staying there, and with whom (as we see in a flashback) Locke had struck up a casual acquaintance, dead in his room of a heart attack. Locke studies the dead man, then methodically goes about exchanging places with him, switching rooms and passports (his deception aided by the native staff’s inability to distinguish or indifference to distinguishing between the two white men). Disguised as Robertson, Locke leaves Africa and, after going for a moment to the threshold of his own London home, instead sets about keeping the itinerary indicated in Robertson’s appointment book. In so doing, he soon discovers that Robertson’s business was selling guns to the African revolutionaries that Locke had sought in vain to contact, and, as far as he’s able, Locke attempts to fulfill Robertson’s commitments.
Meanwhile, Locke’s wife and a colleague of his have learned that a man named Robertson was the last person to talk with Locke before he died, and they join in a search for Robertson, tracking him to Spain and very nearly crossing paths there with the man they presume dead. Locke discovers that the two are looking for him, and flees, picking up a young woman companion along the way. He still tries to keep Robertson’s appointments, but now pursued not only by his wife (who’s found the altered passport in her husband’s effects) but also by agents of the African country’s government, who follow the wife, having been alerted of her intention to contact Robertson. Finally, after appearing for several rendezvous to which no one else comes, Locke is about to abandon Robertson’s itinerary, but he’s urged not to by the woman traveling with him. He temporarily separates from the woman, but goes to keep the next appointment—with a “Daisy,” who has failed to appear on several occasions before. There, at the appointed place, the counterrevolutionary agents track him down and kill him. Accompanied by the local police, Locke’s wife arrives, as does the woman who’s been his passenger (though the passenger of the title is surely Locke, having become a passenger in Robertson’s life). “Is this David Robertson?” the police ask. “Do you recognize him?” The woman answers, “Yes”; the wife replies, “I never knew him.”
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Antonioni made five feature films before making L’Avventura in 1959. Aside from the aforementioned Story of a Love Affair, only two of these have received even the most limited exhibition in this country: L’Amiche (1955), an adaptation from Pavese (which I’ve seen only in an unsubtitled version many years ago), and 1l Grido (1957; starring the American actor, Steve Cochran), an attempt to weld the socially-conscious materials of neo-realism to Antonioni’s thematic preoccupations, which, despite some extraordinary things in it, remains only partially successful. L’Avventura v/as the first film of a loose trilogy completed by La Notte (1961) and Eclipse (1962). What unites the three films is not any continuity of narrative or character, but their thematic concerns: taken together, they constitute the seminal expression of the loss of self, the death of feeling and ebbing of vitality—of alienation—in the modern cinema.
L’Avventura is, with Godard’s Breathless of the same year, one of the two great path-breaking films for the 60’s. Unlike Breathless, however, L’Avventura’s importance lies not in any technical innovation but in its giant appropriation for the film medium of a territory of psychological subtlety and emotional nuance previously thought exclusively to belong to the novel. (And some of the lashing out at the “pretentiousness” of L’Avventura and other films which followed in its wake—I think particularly of an attack on the idea that films could be “deep” by Nicolâ Chiaromonte in Encounter—smacked of the literary intelligentsia’s futile determination to see to it that movies were kept in their place.) How L’Avventura achieved its effects wasn’t easy to say. Antonioni’s stylistic traits—his choreographed long takes, characteristic positioning of actors within the frame, slight lingering on a place for a moment before someone’s entered or after someone’s left, and penchant for the slightly disorienting viewpoint—could all be isolated and analyzed; yet the effects remained, as such things usually do, more a matter of a particular artist’s temperament and sensibility. And before long there was a host of Antonioni imitators to prove that these things could be imitated without creating a like effect (one has only to compare the use of place in an Antonioni film with the programmatic use of landscapes in Alain Tanner’s recent, The Middle of The World) . The famous epilogue to Eclipse, with its hushed, expectant montage of places and things, all of them pervaded by a sense of the characters’ absence and of an appointment between them which may or may not be kept, contains nothing, technically, that is extraordinary, yet it’s one of the most overwhelmingly and amazingly resonant passages in all of film. One could, perhaps, reproduce some facsimile of the characteristic Antonioni space, and of the Antonioni words, but not the sense his films convey of somehow capturing the space between words, and words echoing in space.
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Coming after L’Avventura, La Notte, a depiction of a married couple brought by a visit to a dying friend to face the death of feeling in their marriage, seemed to lack some of the earlier film’s mysterious allusiveness, to be more insistent in its mood and meaning, and less spacious. But Eclipse, of which one might expect (and in which the critics found) a more ponderous despair, is perhaps the most impressively unstressed of the three, with the odd if fugitive gaiety and the emotional delicacy of its account of a sometimes childish but always affectionately drawn young woman seeking vitality and fulfillment in an affair with a dynamically energetic stockbroker. (We’re introduced to the man in the film’s famous stock-exchange sequence which critics tended to regard as a savage denunciation of capitalist frenzy, but which seems to me not without an envious appreciation of the manic, misplaced energy of the place, and puts me in mind less of some Pudovkin-like satire than of Yeats’s “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”) Eclipse opens with the heroine’s ending of an old love affair, and goes on delicately to trace the new affair’s burgeoning and development until it reaches just that stage at which an atrophy of feeling like that which caused the end of the earlier affair seems, with a paralyzing inevitability, to settle over this one.
Eclipse was followed, two years later, by The Red Desert, which seemed, at least in its middle and later sections, to verge on becoming just that sort of heavily oppressive, modishly bleak work Antonioni’s detractors had been accusing him of making all along. The Red Desert seemed also a work of artistic exhaustion: an exhaustion of Antonioni’s ability to give fresh expression to the themes of which the trilogy was a summation. All of Antonioni’s work to follow can be seen as a response to that exhaustion, not, as in Fellini’s case, by an ever greater self-absorption and self-indulgence, but by a bringing to the fore of those plot elements which underlay the earlier films, and by a change of locale. Blow-Up (1966) was Antonioni’s London film (and his first English-language work), and, compared with his earlier films, a superficial work, a deliberate externalization of the materials of his work before. Yet, in its sheer film-making brilliance, it’s also an immensely exciting work, and probably no film has captured more indelibly the dream London of the 60’s: London as a mod City of Youth.
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Blow-Up was followed in 1970 by Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s American film, which despite my initial disappointment, I find something a good deal more than that unmitigated disaster it was generally taken to be. Testimony to how far the film is from the mindless “fellow traveling” with America’s youth culture of the 60’s it was accused of being is how little it was liked by that leftist counterculture it was supposedly romanticizing; the film’s attitude toward America’s student “revolutionaries” is sympathetic and even hopeful, but it depicts them nevertheless as posturing, feckless, and self-destructive. (Antonioni’s failure to defer to those one might presume him to be trying to please can be seen further in the criticism leveled by the Chinese authorities at his documentary, China, his only film between Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, and a work I was unable to see when a shortened version of it was shown on network television.) And far from being the hysterical, anti-American travelogue-of-ugliness its hostile critics labeled it, Zabriskie Point seems to me marked by its open, curious, and surprised response to the rough, outsized, but not unbeautiful look of its Western American setting. (One recalls here that Antonioni said of The Red Desert, in a conversation with Godard published in Cahiers du Cinema, that he actually found much that was aesthetically exciting in that film’s industrial lunar landscape, and thought one ought to adapt oneself to the transformed world in which one lived.)
Above all, like Blow-Up before it and The Passenger after, Zabriskie Point is distinguished by that painterly beauty of surface which characterizes the visual aspect of Antonioni’s work since The Red Desert. The Red Desert was Antonioni’s first color film, and, in making it, he grew absorbed with the expressive possibilities of color to an almost obsessive degree (painting grass, etc.). But the kinds of schematic uses of color which mar some of The Red Desert give way, in the later work, to a richly sensuous employment of color for no other sake than its own. There are moments when my recollections of The Red Desert crystallize into a set of studies of the red shack that figures so prominently in the film’s earlier sections (which are also much the film’s most successful sections dramatically). And Zabriskie Point may spring to mind solely in the images of a foreshortened, bill-board-jammed skyscape, and the American flag seen flapping outside Rod Taylor’s office window in variations ranging from a sculptural solidity to a Jasper Johns-like flatness. Even now, only a week after seeing The Passenger, I sometimes find myself thinking back on the film as a succession of abstract canvases in white, beige, and a range of cool blues.
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The Passenger is based on an original story for the screen by Mark Peploe, and scripted by Peploe, Peter Wollen (a British film critic), and (presumably, in its later stages) Antonioni. I don’t know the extent to which the project was actually tailored for Antonioni by Peploe and Wollen from the beginning, though internal evidence suggests very strongly that it was. I gather, however, that Antonioni has said that he hesitated for a fairly long while before deciding to film the script, finally undertaking to do so out of some sort of intuition. The intuition is understandable—The Passenger is not only full of echoes of Antonioni’s previous work, it is, in a sense, L’Avventura told from the viewpoint of the one who disappears. But a sounder instinct is reflected in Antonioni’s long hesitation.
“In Italy, forty thousand people disappear each year. They’d fill a stadium,” one of the characters in L’Avventura remarks. There’s an exchange of lines in The Passenger that seems to me worthy of L’Avventura, when the woman Locke picks up says, “People disappear every day,” and he replies, “Every time they leave the room.” More typical of the film, however, is the lugubrious despair of Locke telling her, “I’ve run out of everything . . . my wife . . . a house . . . an adopted child . . . a successful job . . . everything except a few bad habits I can’t get rid of,” and such vacant dialogue as, “Excuse me, I was trying to remember something / Was it important? / No.” More typical still is the speech by an old man on how children only repeat the mistakes of their elders, and a plodding allegory recounted by Locke just before he meets his death about a blind man (clearly, Locke himself) who recovered his sight only to have his initial elation turn to pain at his discovery of the world’s ulginess. Thus far, in the language of his three English-language films, Antonioni (who’s not, I gather, fluent in English) has been well served only once—by Edward Bond in Blow-Up; but rarely have so many wooden and portentous lines been employed to so little effect as in The Passenger (their effect not enhanced by the toneless readings Jack Nicholson has apparently been coached to give them). Perhaps I overestimate Wollen’s influence on the work, but it seems to me very much a critic’s idea—a bad idea—of what an Antonioni film consists of.
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At any rate, symbols and symmetries pile up in The Passenger in a way quite unlike that of any Antonioni film before: there’s even another copy of Tender Is the Night (that famous instance of a switch in narrating voices, whose appearance in L’Avventura makes for what’s perhaps that film’s one false note), unless my eyes played tricks on me, though the neat dovetailing of this with the Fitzgeraldian “Daisy” who recurs in Robertson’s appointment book suggests they did not. (One felicitous symmetry that strikes me as typically Antonioni’s own is provided by a shot of Locke “flying” at great height in a cable car while he’s still intoxicated by his new lease on life, and a later, similarly exhilarating image when his woman companion asks him what he’s running away from and he has her turn to look back from their open-topped, speeding car.) In addition, the kind of mystery-thriller plot that’s been used so unobtrusively by Antonioni in the past has been fancied up in The Passenger with some appointment-in-Samarra-like fatalism (one of the film’s working titles was Fatal Exit) as Locke keeps Robertson’s final rendezvous with Daisy at the Hotel de la Gloria. Given the way the movie’s themes announce themselves, it’s not surprising that The Passenger promises to be not only Antonioni’s greatest popular success (Jack Nicholson insures that) but his best-received film to date, with the reviewers obliging from one’s declaration that “It may turn out to be the definitive spiritual testament of our times” to another’s mind-boggling assertion that “Antonioni shows how this . . . modern inability to communicate transcends language barriers.”
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But such things as I’ve mentioned are only the least of what goes wrong in The Passenger. Wollen and Peploe have correctly seized on the metaphor of the “missing person” (extending, in a film such as Eclipse, to embrace the sense of a person with something vital missing in her life) which has figured so centrally in the director’s work before, but they’ve failed to see how the mystery-plot elements have been used to serve the theme by Antonioni. If the plot of L’Avventura can be summed up as the search by two people for another who’s missing while the film’s unfolding, by the end one would more accurately say: a young woman disappears, and an entire world seems sucked into the vacuum left by her disappearance. Even in a work as outwardly similar to The Passenger as Blow-Up, the plot elements gradually transform themselves until, by the end, the protagonist’s search becomes no longer one for proof of a murder but for proof of an act of passion, an act bespeaking an intensity of feeling of a kind which so utterly eludes his affective range that, by the film’s last shot, he’s seen to be cut off from the sources of feeling so thoroughly as literally to vanish from sight, as though he were only an optical illusion. But The Passenger starts, in effect, where the other films end: with its protagonist in a desert, at the end of his rope. Whereas in earlier Antonioni films the mood and meaning gradually emerge from, and are an extension of, the plot, in The Passenger mood and meaning are needed to propel the plot: Locke’s despair provides the only logic for his assuming Robertson’s identity. The Passenger starts out with a heavy freight of alienation from which an unresonant mystery-thriller plot trails off through the remainder of the film like an appendage.
There are, of course, some admirable things about The Passenger, among them that extraordinary visual beauty which has marked all of Antonioni’s later work; anyone caring about movies can’t help but be excited by the stylistic accomplishment with which this film’s been made. And at least on first viewing (contrary to my expectation, it seemed even thinner when I saw it a second time) the film is kept alive by Antonioni’s characteristic eye for seemingly marginal but curiously riveting and affecting detail: from the way Locke studies Robertson and touches his hair when he finds him dead to such things as the couple quareling off to the side in a sequence set in a Gaudi house; from a shot of a hotel porter listening for a moment at a door to the way Locke, before keeping his final appointment, picks a small red flower and smashes it into a crumbling white wall which he leaves with its stain. Indeed, for all the acclaim being lavished on the film’s penultimate sequence for its technical innovation (the camera, attached to a newly developed mounting, is enabled, with an extraordinary freedom, to travel from the inside of a building to a courtyard outside which it then roams in a single shot), what is most impressive about it is the selection and choreography of the often seemingly extraneous but marvelously evocative wealth of detail which the shot contains: an old man sitting in the distance, a dog playing, a boy in a red shirt throwing a stone, a woman in a halter running across the frame. Yet in some ways even more impressive is the film’s very last shot: a distant, head-on but asymmetrical view of the hotel in which Locke has died, as evening turns to night and the lights inside warmly glow: another of those Antonioni “still lifes,” mysteriously reverberant with the sense of something momentous and ineffable which has taken place and left its residue.
But for all such felicities, The Passenger seems to me an enervated work, one signaling the kind of exhaustion of its director’s most recent vein that The Red Desert did of the phase before. And though Antonioni’s films since The Red Desert have been distinguished by their formal brilliance, they have really, in no sense, constituted any development in his art, offering, at best, only a pause for self-renewal. The Antonioni of The Passenger seems to me at a turning point in his career, and a crucial one. It remains to be seen whether the “success” of The Passenger will prove, far more than the “failure” of Zabriskie Point, a dangerous omen for his work to come, whether he really is and will remain where his new work seems to find him: in a desert, and at the end of his rope.
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