Professione: reporter

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The Passenger (Professione: reporter) is a film directed and co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni, released in 1975, in which Jack Nicholson stars as a reporter in Africa who assumes the identity of a dead stranger. The film competed for the "Palme d'Or" award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

David Locke, a television journalist played by Jack Nicholson, is in an African desert searching for rebels. He keeps failing: his contacts abandon him, his Series 3 LWB Land Rover gives out. Tired of his work, his marriage and his life, he decides to switch identity with a mysterious Englishman staying at the same hotel, Mr Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), who has died suddenly overnight. To assume Robertson's identity, David must carefully cut the photographs out of their passports, swap them, and reseal them. Since the hotel manager has already mistaken him for Robertson, the plan should go off without any hitches.

The ruse works, and Locke's wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) is eventually informed of his death. Unable to believe it or accept it, she attempts to contact the sole witness, Robertson (i.e. Locke masquerading as the Englishman) to find out about his death. "Robertson" (Locke) has now returned to Europe with the dead Robertson's appointment book.

As Locke works to keep Robertson's meetings across Europe, he learns that Robertson was a gunrunner for the rebels and unpopular with the government opposing them. A team has been sent with orders to assassinate him. Later he finds himself followed by a journalism colleague trying to track him down on behalf of his wife. Moreover, Robertson's business associates are unhappy about being stiffed on the sale of merchandise which has never arrived. He feels he is being watched and asks an architecture student (Maria Schneider, playing a character who is never named) to retrieve his belongings from a Barcelona hotel. She and Locke become close companions.

Attempting to flee the authorities, he has some close calls and run-ins with the local police. His girlfriend is loyal and also helpful because she speaks Spanish like a native.

The thugs eventually catch up with him at the Hotel de la Gloria,^[1] in a Spanish town (Osuna, province of Seville). The assassination takes place off screen in a widely noted, seven minute long take-tracking shot which begins in a hotel room, travels out into a dusty parking area and tracks back into the hotel room.^[2]

Penultimate shot

The shot was very difficult to accomplish and is widely studied by film students. Since the shot was continuous, it was not possible to adjust the lens aperture at the moment when the camera passed from the room to the square. Hence the footage had to be taken in the very late afternoon near dusk to minimize light differences between interior and exterior.

Atmospheric conditions caused more worries. The weather was windy and dusty but the crew needed stillness to ensure smooth camera movement. Antonioni put the camera in a sphere so the wind would catch it less but then this wouldn't fit through the window.

Moreover, the camera ran on a ceiling track in the hotel room and when it came outside the window, was picked up by a hook suspended from a giant crane nearly thirty metres high. A system of gyroscopes was fitted on the camera to steady it during the switch from a smooth track to the less stable but more mobile crane. The bars on the outside of the window were fitted on hinges and as the camera came up to them, they were swung away. The camera lens zoomed whilst its forward movement paused and the hook of the crane caught onto the camera, pulling it from the track. Antonioni directed the scene from a van by means of monitors and microphones, talking to assistants who communicated his instructions to the actors and operators.

In a DVD commentary decades later Nicholson said Antonioni built the entire hotel so as to get this famous shot. Although it is often referred to as the "final shot" of the film, the last shot comes next, showing a small driving school car driving away in the twilight some time later, holding on the hotel as the credits begin to roll.

Reception

Part of the plot in the scenery : roof of la Pedrera, in Barcelona as one could see it in 1975 (very different from now). Nicholson's character meets The Girl there to recover his stuff at the hotel and then try to escape the thugs, both driving to Andalusia.

The Passenger has been considered remarkable for its camerawork (by Luciano Tovoli) and acting. While the movie has been critically praised by such movie critics as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, it has also been criticized by Roger Ebert, Danny Peary and others for being slow-moving and pretentious. Ebert has since changed his stance on the film, and now considers it a perceptive look at identity, alienation, and mankind's desire to escape oneself.

References

• Arrowsmith, William; Ted Perry (1995). Antonioni: The Poet of Images. New York: Oxford University Press, 195. ISBN 0195092708. 
• Chatman, Seymour (1985). Antonioni: Or, the surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 290. ISBN 0520053419. 

External links

• The Passenger's Official Site at Sony Pictures
• The Passenger at the Internet Movie Database
• The Passenger at Metacritic
• The Passenger Meets History, by Robert Koehler
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. SlantMagazine.com
• DVD review of The Passenger
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times, 11/04/2005
• Review of The Passenger in its 2005 re-release. Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 10/28/2005
• Roger Ebert's review of The Passenger
• Turner, Jack (1999). Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text. Other Voices 1 (3).

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