![]() The stranger had had an appointment book with meeting dates in Munich, Barcelona, and Osuna and Locke decides to keep the appointments. When a stranger in his hotel, who resembles him physically, dies of a heart attack, Locke swaps “bodies” and passports with him and flies back to Europe so that now everyone thinks that it’s Locke who has died. He fails to do so, which sparks off what’s evidently a long-smoldering personal dissatisfaction with his life and work. When the film starts, Locke’s in some African country finishing up a documentary on political events and trying to get an interview with a guerrilla leader of the country. He’s not happy at home: his wife argues with him about his work, and she has a lover. He specializes in political documentaries. The hero is the Jack Nicholson character, David Locke, a man in his early thirties, who is a successful, respected, and rather famous maker of television documentaries for the British public television network. I have, therefore, developed a very specific five-point litmus test to alert the reader to whether or not they are bluffing.īut first, especially for those who may not have seen The Passenger, let me just give a synopsis of the storyline to help readers get a fix on what the film is about: Many reviewers, not really having understood what Antonioni was on about, make some chance, witty, or cruel remarks about the film, and, far from placing the film politically and artistically, engage in what can only be called bluffing. I, on the contrary, find the film eminently clear and easy to explicate, and not just in an erudite way for other film specialists, but in a matter-of-fact, unsophisticated way for the intelligent layman. They give their readers the impression that the film is enigmatic and difficult to explicate and so they explicate it very little. Either they like or dislike the film for all the wrong reasons, or at least, for reasons irrelevant to the film’s political and artistic thrust. Yet I find that just about all contemporary reviewers of the film, certainly the American ones, from first to last, seem not to know quite what the film is about, certainly not what it is about politically. This 1975 film of Antonioni’s has, for the most part, assumed an important place in his oeuvre. His elucidation of Antonioni’s film has stood the test of time. In his distinctive way, he set himself to show with precision just what the film was actually about. A thrust of what Price wrote is that many commentators to that time – and since, he feels – missed the essential point of the film. ![]() At the time of writing, the author had access to an extended copy of the film’s script and to an interview with Antonioni. Aside from the title change (at the author’s discretion) and the addition of contextual endnotes by Ken Mogg, this version remains substantially identical to the original. This lucid essay by US academic Theodore Price, now retired, was originally published under the title “Film Maudit: The Political and Religious Meaning of Antonioni’s The Passenger” in the now long out-of-print Portland, Oregon based journal Cinemonke y ( vol. To mark the occasion, Senses of Cinema reprints an article on the film originally published in 1979. Introductory note: 2015 sees the 40th anniversary of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (aka Profession: Reporter ), arguably one of the Italian director’s greatest masterpieces.
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