The existentialist's James Bond.
***image3***Art is like ham, Diego Rivera famously said; if that's true, one could perhaps be forgiven the temptation to brine an actor like Jack Nicholson overnight in Dr Pepper and barbecue him with canned pineapple slices for Easter brunch. Yet there was a time, circa
Chinatown
-before
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, long before
The Shining
and certainly well before
Batman
-when Jack didn't trawl through cinema with the scenery hanging from his jaws; the re-release of Antonioni's 1975
Professione: reporter
(retitled
The Passenger
) provides an ample ambling canvas for Nicholson to portray something altogether less showy and more subtly existential.
Journalist David Locke (Nicholson) is stuck, his metaphorical (and literal) jeep mired in the sand of an unidentified sub-Sarahan African country where he's failed to get the story. Returning to his hotel in defeat, he discovers in an adjoining room the body of a businessman who has apparently died of natural causes. Being the cryptic, antiheroic sort, Locke does of course what any one would do: He exchanges his identity with that of the dead man, and (armed with his new passport, appointment book and an airplane ticket on which is written, enigmatically, MUNICH, BOX 58) goes forth into Europe to seek his adventure. Fortunately he encounters Maria Schneider, fresh from
Last Tango in Paris
, a footloose student agreeably willing to ride shotgun and use her command of European languages to help David unravel his new destiny.
Now, the laws of moviegoing dictate that when you exchange your identity with that of a dead person, that individual will almost never have been, say, an elementary schoolteacher, or a lowly movie reviewer. Rather, you can expect to be submerged almost immediately in a seedy underworld milieu. Thus David's shadowy fate unfolds across England, Germany and Spain, with turns of the screw that feel inevitable, yet unhurried.
***image2***While the leisurely, uncut pans of desert à la David Lean are certainly worth writing home about, Antonioni's work is as or more interesting when he's tracking the progress of tiny black beetles up a whitewashed cord, dwelling intently on Schneider's faux-babyface features-or, perhaps most disturbingly, zooming in on a firing-squad execution (real, not acted). At any given moment, whatever lies in Antonioni's field of vision (and hearing-there's some luscious sound editing) is the most important thing in his world; in this precision as well as in its apparent lack of affect, the film references existentialist fiction such as that of Camus, Paul Bowles and perhaps Walker Percy. "The same old tragedy," David complains of the lives to which we've become inured, deadened. In its ostentative storylessness,
The Passenger
-embodied by Nicholson's performance-peels back accrued layers of narrative convention and reveals plain images in their intrinsic truth.
