w/ Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff. Written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Michelangelo Antonioni. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Region Two DVD. Cert 12.
Commentary Track 1: Jack Nicholson.
Commentary Track 2: Mark Peploe and Aurora Irvine.
For a film so concerned with doubles, dopplegangers and structural oppositions, it seems only appropriate that the DVD of THE PASSENGER should come with two, very different, Commentary Tracks. Leading man Jack Nicholson delivers his first ever Commentary in an impossibly deep and throaty mono-whisper, free associating as he watches the movie with us. On the second Track, screenwriter Mark Peploe responds slightly irritably to a few soft questions discretely posed by his friend Aurora Irvine (a name straight out of an Antonioni film, if ever there was.)
Nicholson opens proceedings by describing THE PASSENGER as "probably the biggest adventure in film I ever had in my life" and his admiration for "Maestro" Michelangelo is palpable throughout. He wistfully recalls the great auteur's fascination with new technology - Jack had just bought a Tiffany digital watch that delighted Antonioni - as well as his total mastery of film technique. It's a point echoed by Peploe. Viewing the film for the first time in some ten years, he marvels at the way Antonioni's non-linear editing style boldly roams over space and time, just as his camera imperiously observes and unifies landscape, colour and diagetic sound (music is kept to a minimum), all the while treating the human form as a kind of "moving space", to use Nicholson's memorable phrase.
Peploe collaborated with a friend from his Oxford days, film theorist Peter Wollen, on the first draft of THE PASSENGER screenplay. Wollen had taught in Iran and worked as a foreign correspondent before writing SIGNS AND MEANING IN CINEMA, an early, groundbreaking attempt to apply semiotics and structuralism to the study of classical Hollywood narrative. It's not totally surprising therefore that THE PASSENGER continually circles round such hot 70s film crit topics as identity, representation, the post-colonial 'other' and the difficulty of narrating historical/political 'truth'. At one point the film further blurs the distinction between the real and the unreal by including actual footage of a military execution, a contentious aesthetic choice which Peploe, in a rare moment of disagreement with his director, remarks is "still very painful to me".
The film's opening section finds television journalist Peter Locke (Nicholson) heading out into the Sahara in order to create an image of desert war for the west, as Jack puts it. The desert figured prominently in the writings of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who like Antonioni died this year. Both men seem to view it as a primal space existing outside linear time, where meaning and signification - dwarfed by scale, obliterated by sunlight - can be as shifting as the sands. Or, to quote David Thomson, "The desert is a philosophy in THE PASSENGER". For this part of the film, Antonioni encouraged Nicholson to keep his gestures ("twitches") to a minimum, and it's a pleasing change of pace to see the actor be so still, subtle and enigmatic. THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK it ain't.
Frustrated by a lack of 'action' or narrative in the desert, Locke returns to his hotel room, whereupon he discovers the dead body of Robertson, a fellow guest to whom he bears a passing resemblance (the part is played by Charles Mulvehill, in real life a film producer whose long list of credits includes HAROLD AND MAUDE, THE LAST DETAIL, BEING THERE and THE GODFATHER PART 3.) Almost on a whim, Locke decides to swap passports and identities with Robertson. His adoption of this new persona sets the journalist off on a globetrotting journey that takes in London, Munich and Barcelona, and draws him into a deadly game of gun running, torture and mercenary coups.
Peploe confirms that it is Locke who is the passenger of the title (which is curiously presented in quotation marks on both the film's poster and DVD case) - a phantom, a non-person, a tourist who passes through locations and lives, asking superficial questions of his interview subjects and the people that he encounters. His journey through the film represents a doomed attempt to escape an unhappy marriage, the demands of work, the whole mundane world of routine and bourgeois convention without ever deeply engaging with global or personal politics. The film's more prosaic alternative title, PROFESSIONE: REPORTER, was used to avoid confusion with a 1963 Polish movie also called THE PASSENGER.
As an existential road movie that navigates vanishing points, lost horizons and the futile pursuit of freedom, THE PASSENGER has things in common with Monte Hellman's bleak and languid TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971) - in both films, for example, the leading actress (Maria Schneider and Laurie Bird, respectively) is known simply as 'The Girl'. Critics have speculated that Schneider's character is actually Robertson's wife, although neither of the commentaries discuss this ambiguity - sometimes it's good to preserve the mystery.... To reinforce Nicholson's status as a passenger in his own adventure, it was originally intended for The Girl to do all of the driving. This had to be scrapped when Schneider, a non-driver, was cast in the part. Instead, we're rewarded with one of the film's most thrilling shots - The Girl standing up in a roofless car, her arms outstretched, as she and Locke drive down a beautifully symmetrical, tree-lined road.
This DVD edition restores scenes needlessly excised from the American theatrical cut of THE PASSENGER, including an utterly charming, dreamlike sequence near the end of the film where Schneider and Nicholson rest up in a sun-kissed field full of orange trees. Antonioni famously painted patches of grass greener in BLOW UP (1966) and here the oranges were retouched to be less green and more, well, orangey - although Nicholson remembers that while filming at Munich Airport, Antonioni purposely avoided a bright pink plane that just happened to be on the runway, for fear he would be accused of painting that as well.
THE PASSENGER is perhaps best remembered for its final continuous tracking shot, executed with all the precision of a Tiffany watch and lasting nearly seven minutes, which obliquely records Locke's murder in a hotel bedroom. According to Nicholson, the shot was motivated by Antonioni's desire to avoid a straight-forward death scene. To accomplish it, an entire hotel set had to be constructed, complete with collapsible walls and windows. Martin Scorsese, in a recent appreciation of Antonioni's magnificent oeuvre, sums up this transcendental moment beautifully - "the camera moves slowly out the window and into a courtyard, away from the drama of Jack Nicholson's character and into the greater drama of wind, heat, light, the world unfolding in time."
THE FINAL SHOT
