BBCi: The last in a trio of English-language films Antonioni made for MGM, the dazzling The Passenger has been kept out of cinematic distribution for the past two decades owing to copyright disputes. Reissued here in a newly restored version, it showcases one of Jack Nicholson's finest ever screen performances. He plays the burnt-out reporter Locke, who exchanges identities in Chad with a dead acquaintance named Robertson, himself a gun-runner for an African revolutionary group.
"Wouldn't it be better if we could throw it all away?" muses Robertson in a tape recording made before his fatal heart attack, sentiments which chime with Locke's desire to free himself of his current obligations and responsibilities. The Passenger proceeds to explore the impossibility of evading our own personal and national histories, and of truly knowing ourselves and our loved ones. It also suggests how chance - here the discovery of a corpse in a next-door hotel room - shapes our futures.

Review by J Hoberman, The Village Voice:

Re-released on its 30th anniversary in the director's slightly longer "preferred version," The Passenger-Michelangelo Antonioni's once enigmatic Jack Nicholson vehicle-looks better now than it did then, in part because it's so clearly dated.

Together with Blow-Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970), The Passenger-co-written with cinema studies titan Peter Wollen-can be seen as part of a loose trilogy. In each of these ostentatiously with-it and characteristically laconic thrillers, an alienated male protagonist stumbles into some sort of social responsibility. Here, a celebrity tele-journalist (Nicholson) reporting on a North African liberation movement ventures to the heart of enigmatic otherness. The terrain mirrors his own emptiness. But then, as in Casablanca, fate takes a hand. The only other Westerner-or indeed, guest-in his edge-of-the-Sahara hotel conveniently suffers a coronary. Nicholson switches passports and assumes a new identity. Following the dead man's itinerary, he discovers that he is now-if not exactly Bogart's Rick-some sort of left-leaning international gunrunner. He's also hilariously in over his head.

The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars: Fellini adopted Donald Sutherland, Godard captured Jane Fonda, Ingmar Bergman pondered Elliott Gould, and Bernardo Bertolucci hit the jackpot with Marlon Brando. Having secured Nicholson, showman Antonioni paired the American with French hottie du jour Maria Schneider, fresh from Last Tango in Paris and available for sloppy seconds. Nicholson meets her in Barcelona. She introduces him to Gaudi; he drafts her to help him elude his erstwhile producer, annoyingly in town to find the guy Nicholson is pretending to be. Captivated by this morose man of mystery (Nicholson is as attractive and understated as he has ever been), Schneider tags along for the ride. A fellow passenger in his big white Oldsmobile convertible, she's also something of a conscience, encouraging him to continue keeping the dead guy's appointments: It's a form of, how you say, commitment.

The Passenger marks the decline of romantic Third Worldism. Most of the action is specifically set in September 1973-the month of the coup against Salvador Allende. Leftish thrillers with exotic locales are still occasionally made, even in Hollywood (The Interpreter was one, the upcoming Syriana sounds like another). But these typically concern professionals doing their jobs. What dates The Passenger, in addition to Antonioni's gloriously languorous style, is its politicized angst. (Only two years after its release, acolyte Wim Wenders would update the existential international travelogue with The American Friend, turning it into a hipster referendum on American pop.) Spain is no Sahara and Nicholson's character reaches his own dead end somewhere in the vicinity of Gibraltar. Antonioni dramatizes this with a magnificently choreographed slow zoom-clearly inspired by Michael Snow's Wavelength-over the course of which half the characters in the movie transverse the courtyard of an entropic posada. Leisurely and old-fashioned as The Passenger may be, this tour de force ending is worth the wait.

From the Michelangelo Antonioni Website:

The Passenger (1975) resembles in plot two of Antonioni's biggest previous successes. Like L'Avventura, it tells the story of a person who mysteriously disappears in a remote setting, and the search for them by those left behind. Here, however, we see things from the point of view of the disappeared, and there is no mystery about the vanishing. Both films have an architect character, the hero in L'Avventura, the female architecture student here. Both films eventually concentrate on a man and a woman traveling around Southern Europe, and both visit some real-life architectural landmarks.

Like Blowup, the English hero works in a photographic profession, here a maker of documentary films for television. Being a documentary filmmaker makes this protagonist even closer in profession to Antonioni than the fashion photographer in Blowup. However, Antonioni has never been an onscreen newscaster for a TV network, as far as I know - his documentaries have been more self-contained cinematic works than the newscaster's in the film. As in Blowup, examples of the hero's work become films-within-the-film. Antonioni includes some intriguing transitions between scenes showing the hero, to his wife and producer watching documentary footage of these scenes on their television monitors. These resemble similar transitions in Orson Welles' F For Fake (1974). However, The Passenger never builds up the dramatic contrast between art and life that is so potent in Blowup.

One can see echoes of Il Grido as well. Both have a male hero who is apparently disturbed by his wife's or girlfriend's infidelity. In both, the hero gives up his steady work at his long standing profession, and adopts a new wandering life style on the road, one that turns out to be psychologically destructive. However, the working class hero of Il Grido has much less to lose than the wealthy, famous reporter in The Passenger. And he seems a lot more convincingly upset by his beloved's actions. The hero of The Passenger seems more beset by some inner, total alienation, than anything so human as being too emotionally involved in a bad marriage. The behavior of the reporter in The Passenger, never really becomes psychologically plausible, to me at least. I just can't imagine anyone giving up all the advantages this hero has.

I am a bit cynical about this film's ties to previous Antonioni films, despite all of the above. The film never develops the deep interest previous Antonioni films have in their characters and plot situations. The plot here seems superficial, and little more than an excuse to hang the visuals, which are the film's chief interest.

Casting

Jack Nicholson is hardly the first American actor to be implausibly cast as a Brit on screen. Rock Hudson was a scarlet-tunic wearing soldier in the British Raj in Bengal Brigade (Laslo Benedek, 1954), and Rudolph Valentino played wealthy English nobleman "Hector, 10th Earl of Bracondale" in Beyond the Rocks (Sam Wood, 1922). I confess I enjoyed all three of these performances: it is all part of the magic of the movies, that allows people to play act at being members of different heritages. Similarly Englishman Cary Grant could portray a New York advertising executive in North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), and Christian Bale could essay the American detective hero of Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005).

Stylistic Echoes

There are also occasional stylistic similarities here to the two previous works. 1) The opening desert here recalls the desert-like volcanic isles in L'Avventura. 2) Some shots with rocks sticking up out of the desert directly recall shots of the equally level ocean with rock-like islands emerging from it in L'Avventura. 3) The scene on the rooftop of the Gaudi building recalls the church roof scene in the previous film. The lines of clothes here echo the lines of bell-ropes in the roof in L'Avventura. 4) The way Antonioni's camera looks down from the Gaudi roof to the fascinatingly curved balconies below, however, recalls not the church roof scene in L'Avventura, but the opening island and the looks down its cliffs. 5) The episode here in the new, modernistic town, full of empty streets and white futuristic buildings, recalls the similar episode in the deserted, planned town full of white buildings in L'Avventura. The two scenes are striking visual echoes of each other. 6) The shots of the couple in the car, tearing down a country road, recall the opening drive to the boating weekend in L'Avventura.

The green street scenes in Munich, and the entrance into what looks like park-like regions, recall the entrance to the park in Blowup. Both are dominated by leafy green trees and green grass.
Some scenes here anticipate Beyond the Clouds. The African hotel in the beginning anticipates the hotel interiors in the later film. The church wedding, in a baroque traditional church, also anticipates the church services in the later film.

The long-take finale recalls Antonioni's love of interior shots that include exteriors seen through windows.