Rent The Passenger (1975)

He's got a ticket to ride, and he don't care... - The Passenger review by Count Otto Black

To call this film a "thriller" is stretching the definition of the word to its limit. Although its basic plot - a man is mistaken for a different man and accidentally becomes involved in something extremely dangerous he doesn't at first know about, let alone understand - is the same as that of quite a few thrillers, "North By Northwest" for example, the title says it all. Jack Nicholson's character is a strangely passive protagonist who is literally along for the ride. It just happens to be somebody else's ride.

The film's major virtue is that it's extraordinarily well made. The scenery deserves to be credited as at least three-quarters of the cast, and Antonioni really knows how to make it perform. Even though architecture features heavily, he's never crass enough to give us a shot of Big Ben or Tower Bridge so we know we're in London, and scruffy little backstreets get the same loving attention as cathedrals. Antonioni also does an excellent job of persuading us that these characters inhabit a world where ordinary people are going about their business doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with the main characters and their adventures. When did you last see a Hollywood movie in which the Universe didn't revolve around the hero? This film cleverly plays with that idea by throwing in an enormous coincidence which our hero notices and gets a bit paranoid about, but which is actually meaningless and irrelevant.

Its major flaw is that, frankly, not a lot happens, and what does happen doesn't always make sense. Jack Nicholson, acting the way he could before he became an A-list megastar and descended into self-parody, is excellent as the reporter so world-weary that, given a chance to pretend to be dead and reinvent himself, he jumps at it before you can say "Reginald Perrin". But since he seems to be both emotionally and, nearly all of the time, geographically distant from the few remaining people in his life, there doesn't appear to be any good reason why he needs to go to such lengths to escape from very little other than a marriage that's obviously on the rocks anyway. "Escaping from himself" in the way that he does comes across as the kind of unrealistically symbolic thing characters in arty fiction do, and his acceptance of a destiny which all but the most naïve viewers will see coming a very long way in advance is even more unrealistic, especially in a movie that constantly shows us ordinary people getting on with their lives in a perfectly normal fashion.

This is a superb piece of pure film-making, but as a story, it doesn't have much substance. Oddly it's not boring, but I think that's mainly because it's so technically accomplished and beautifully shot. And I'm afraid that, although she's extraordinarily cute, Maria Shneider often appears to be having trouble acting and speaking English at the same time. It's arthouse cinema at its best, but for better or worse, probably a bit of both, it's very arthouse indeed.

Very Good - The Passenger review by SB

The original French title of this film ('Profession:Reporteur') gives a better idea of what this film is about, with its suggestions of being an observer rather than participant, of always being restless and moving on, of a deep form of superficiality. Basically a story of how a man tries to disappear by adopting another man's identity and then finding that man's life even harder to live, the film has two very good performances in the leads. Jack Nicholson is deeply unlikeable but very right for the reporter, and Maria Schneider's performance as the young woman he finds en route is more multi-dimensional than in 'Last Tango in Paris' which she made only a couple of years earlier. She has changed physically too and manages to embody distance alongside sizzling heat. The ending of the film, where the surroundings seem to swallow up life, is a masterpiece of direction.

The only thing that seems unlikely is that the 1970s Spanish police would devote so much time and effort to chasing around on the basis of very vague information about someone who is not even Spanish. But the wife's involvement lends an essential extra side to the story.

An odd existentialist film starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider - The Passenger review by Philip in Paradiso

David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a jaded, tired-out and disaffected TV journalist based in England. He finds himself in the North of Chad, reporting on the guerilla movement rocking this part of the country. Locke tries to interview some rebel fighters, who are involved in the country's civil war. He runs into various difficulties and his attempt fails, resulting in an exhausting trek across the desert back to his hotel. Locke had struck a casual friendship with an Englishman also staying at the hotel, called Robertson, who is a businessman. Locke finds Robertson's dead body in his room: he has died from a heart attack, unbeknown to the hotel's management. Locke decides to become Robertson: he succeeds in switching identities with the dead businessman. The film develops from here.

The movie has been described as a thriller, but it is, rather, an existentialist tale and a psychological drama. In many ways, it is a weird film: not much happens and it feels slow at times. The characters seem to be drifting about through their lives, without a clear aim or purpose. Locke, more particularly, is a cynical and lonely character, seeking a new beginning in his life: he is tired of his hit-or-miss journalistic career and has had sentimental and personal setbacks, as we learn later in the film. He lacks direction, however, and seems to be forever improvising, in a random and sometimes capricious manner, without measuring the potential consequences of his actions, almost as if he did not actually care. That is why the film has often been referred to as a study in emptiness: even the landscape, at the start of the film, is starkly empty - a never-ending desert moonscape with very few locals, eking out a living in poverty. To depict emptiness - the void at the centre of life, if one wants to look at it in such a way - is not easy, but Michelangelo Antonioni manages very well to make us feel it in our bones, almost as if we could touch this desperate randomness and existential emptiness.

Is it a masterpiece? No, not in my opinion, because the ironic and detached depiction of emptiness has its limits. This stance cannot involve us in the story in a deeply emotional way. Is it an interesting and original movie? Absolutely. In this respect, I recommend this unusual story, well-filmed and well-acted, which throws up more questions than it gives us answers. An intelligent and disconcerting movie.