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Bon voyage
Antonioni’s The Passenger sets off again
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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"What’s on the other side of that window?" That’s the question Locke (Jack Nicholson) asks Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill) near the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 MGM film The Passenger, which is getting a 30th-anniversary re-release, in its uncut European version, this week. And he’s not talking about the window of the hotel room in the small, revolution-torn African country (Chad?) where he and his fellow Englishman are sharing a drink. He’s asking what’s on the other side of life. The Passenger describes his attempt to find out. Locke’s own life is a mess: he has a job, investigative reporting, that he’s not very good at (as we see in moviola flashbacks when he tries to interview the country’s head of state and a witch doctor) and a wife (Jenny Runacre) back in London who has a lover. So when he finds Robertson dead, of an apparent heart attack, he switches passports. His new identity’s airline tickets take him to London, where he pays a final visit to his flat, and then Munich, where he discovers that Robertson’s business is obtaining guns for the rebels. On to Barcelona, where he fails to reconnect with the rebels but does hook up with a Girl (Maria Schneider) who encourages him to carry on with his new life. They make their way down the Costa del Sol to Osuna and Robertson’s final appointment, which proves final for Locke. Or is it? Locke is, like all of us, the passenger of the title; what he doesn’t know is his destination or the identity of his driver/pilot, assuming there is one. His physical vehicles — a Land Rover and a white convertible — break down; Antonioni’s camera keeps wandering away from him, trying to show him where and how to look, how to be the protagonist of the film. Starting with the crucified pose he assumes against his deceased Land Rover, his journey is a passion through stations of the cross, a vita nuova guided by a Beatrice who’s more like Mary Magdalene; the Gloria of a saint in the church in Munich leads to the Hotel de la Gloria in Osuna. His first impulse is to hide. "People disappear every day," the Girl tells him in Gaudí’s Palau Güell. "Every time they leave the room," he replies. The room, however, isn’t so easy to leave. Time and space keep collapsing (if Antonioni were a painter, he’d be Giorgio Morandi), and though Locke eventually leaves the green world of European civilization and returns to the desert, this time in southern Spain, Rachel, having spotted Robertson’s photo in her husband’s passport, follows, bringing his old life and "the same old codes" after him. By keeping Robertson’s last appointment, he’s taken himself, and us, as far as he can, but Antonioni’s camera takes us farther, squeezing through the iron bars of the Hotel de la Gloria window like a human soul, out into the freedom of the plaza and the sea and the sky beyond, then turning to look back at Locke’s body on the bed and hear Rachel say, "I never knew him," and the Girl say she did. Night falls; the Hotel de la Gloria lights up, and the background music (in a film that has hardly any) recalls the end of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, another film with a Girl. A man and a woman — the hotel proprietors? — argue in the doorway; he walks out of the frame, she sits down to wait. Antonioni’s camera just watches, wondering what we’ve learned.
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