Last night I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, who's better known for her work in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.  In Antonioni's 1975 film, she plays a "tourist studying architecture" who helps Nicholson (David Locke, a renowned journalist) carry on with his plan to continue pretending to be someone else, a man he met in Saharan Africa named Robertson.  They resemble each other enough that once Robertson has died of a heart attack, Locke switches passport photos and passports with him, takes his things, and assumes the responsibilities of the dead man's life.  Robertson, it turns out, was an arms dealer.  Locke impersonates him, as if seeking meaning in another man's skin.  He makes good money off of carrying out Robertson's next deal in Munich, and proceeds to Barcelona to meet again with Robertson's customers, representatives of rebels fighting a civil war in North Africa that Locke had been trying to locate for his documentary.
     As complicated as this might sound, the film unfolds slowly enough to allow the viewer access to its many mysteries.  I've seen The Passenger maybe six or seven times.  Since Antonioni is my favorite filmmaker I watch each of his movies over and over again.  He was a master of space and the subtle revelation.  His movies don't addle the viewer's nerves.  They're quiet, poetic, haunting, beautiful, filled with cinematographic compositions that should be blown up and framed for presentation on museum walls.
     The Passenger pulls on my imagination because of its existential theme of a man who can no longer be himself--his identity has failed him, his profession, reporter, become meaningless since he can no longer make sense of what he's reporting on: a civil war he can't find.  His encounter with Robertson in the hotel they're staying in is ultimately just a coincidence Locke acts upon.  His
difficulties with this escape from who he is constitute most of the film's action, with Maria Schneider's character behaving from the viewpoint of someone who knows only the man running away from himself, and treats him as he is in the present, knowing nothing of his past.
     In this sense, The Passenger is like a Hollywood crime film with a pair of lovers on the run, engaged in illicit activities (gunrunning in this case).  In such Hollywood films (Gun Crazy, They Live By Night, Bonnie and Clyde) the criminal lovers on the run live in a stretched-out present doomed to end once the law catches up.  The Passenger, though it has this theme, doesn't explode in the end with the accentuated sound bursts of Hollywood gunfire.  Rather, it's like Locke, the man who chooses not to exist, but continues existing until he runs out of gas, becomes a ghost, real only to the last person (Maria Schneider's character) who knows him and accepts him regardless of his identity.
     Watching the film last night it became obvious to me at the end why I keep going back to it.  The Passenger is the only film I've ever seen that so memorably focuses on a character so fed up with his life that he changes into another person.  In doing so he attracts back onto himself the turbulence of the very same civil war he couldn't find in his profession as reporter.

                                                                              Vic Neptune