A Secondhand Life

By JAY COCKS

THE PASSENGER

Directed by MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI Screenplay by MARK PEPLOE, PETER WOLLEN and MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

Like much of Antonioni's work, The Passenger uses eerie and voluptuous imagery to define a condition of spiritual paralysis. His is a chill world, ordered and mysterious, where hope hardly abides.

Here, as in L'Avventura and La Notte, Antonioni's unsettled protagonist becomes increasingly the victim of a malaise that has no clear source. A television journalist named Locke (Jack Nicholson) is on assignment in a remote corner of the North African desert, trying to run to ground a story on some guerrilla fighters. The barren, blasted landscapes, the unknown language and ways of the few people Locke meets, are all transformed by Antonioni into coded messages of fate.

Locke, in any case, is lost. He does not find the guerrillas, and frustrations are so pressing that they bring him to his knees beside his stalled Land Rover, crying "All right, I don't care," into the vastness of the desert. In all this emptiness, Antonioni can make him seem hopelessly imprisoned.

It is only in the sudden death of a casual acquaintance that Locke sees a chance to escape. Robertson had told Locke he was simply "on business" in this unlikely location. There is a physical resemblance between the two men, and when Locke discovers Robertson dead of a heart attack, he stares at him like a man at his own funeral. Then, after a time, he puts on Robertson's blue shirt and changes the photographs on both their passports. He leaves Africa with a new life.

Besides the passport, Locke has Robertson's engagement book and his plane ticket with a Munich airport locker number scrawled on its face.

He begins to follow Robertson's future with no knowledge of his past. He keeps the appointment in Munich and discovers that Robertson was an arms trafficker, running guns to the rebels that Locke had tried to interview. As Robertson, Locke becomes active, a participant in history rather than a recorder of it. But he remains irresolute in his new identity. The masquerade of rebirth is only a stalling action. And as the film's last scene reveals, he makes himself a willing accomplice in Robertson's own destiny.

The Passenger has the anxious ambience and level melancholy of Graham Greene's fiction, but unlike Greene, Antonioni lets the narrative ravel.

This is not necessarily a flaw. L'Avventura seemed initially to be about the search for a woman lost on an island. Then Antonioni --deliberately and to much controversy--abandoned this theme in favor of another, deeper one, a portrait of a whole inert society. In The Passenger, he lets go of the thriller elements midway and starts to concentrate on the growing relationship between Locke and a young tourist (Maria Schneider). But the change of focus does not deepen the picture as it did in L'Avventura. Instead, it diverts it while saying nothing new about Locke.

No one looks to an Antonioni movie for fine and varied performances. He tends to depersonalize actors, although Nicholson manages a certain level of bleak intensity, and Maria Schneider is winning, despite an unrealized role.

What Antonioni gives is a distinctive and disorienting way of seeing. The Passenger has some of the boldest and most supple imagery that Antonioni has achieved in years -- more memorable than anything in Blow -Up or the unfortunate Zabriskie Point. Images are charged with mystery: Locke greets a camel rider all hidden in robes and wearing dark glasses. The man moves by him, staring but not answering. He seems to signal death in his every aspect.

The Passenger ends with a scene that seems destined for cinematic history.

Like other famous closing scenes -- the frozen frame at the end of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, for instance, or the camera moving down the long line of waiting men in Max Ophuls' Lola Montez -- this one is made with a flourish of virtuosity. The sequence is accomplished in a single stunning shot, which goes from Locke's hotel room slowly out into a town square and back again to the win dow of the hotel. The elements shift and change, but the moving camera gives them continuity. Without a single cut, the scene lasts seven minutes and brings together all the elements in Locke's world. It would be unfair to tell exactly what happens, but watching Antonioni make it happen is a rare sensual pleasure. The Passenger is not a great film, but its very ambition is a reminder of how smug and easy most movies are, and how little they dare.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.