Antonioni's 1975 film The Passenger has been lost to film audiences in the U.S. for years, and this new rerelease restores the legendary director's original cut, allowing his astonishing visual sense to be experienced on the big screen. Although it's incredibly slow, The Passenger is relatively accessible for an Antonioni film, wrapping the filmmaker's existential musings on the nature of self around a surprisingly conventional thriller plot.
Not that you should expect The Bourne Identity, or even Three Days of the Condor, although The Passenger does bear some passing similarities to other political thrillers of its time. Nicholson stars as David Locke, a journalist documenting guerilla rebels in an unnamed African country. Fed up with his job and life, David encounters an unexpected opportunity when the man in a neighboring hotel room dies of a heart attack. Seemingly on the spur of the moment, he switches passport photographs with the dead man and takes on a new identity.
The problem, of course, is that there isn't any way to truly escape the self, and David is plagued both by his new identity (the dead man turns out to have been an international arms dealer) and his old one (his wife is not so quick to accept his fabricated demise). It sounds like the plot for a suspenseful, globe-trotting thriller, and at times it almost threatens to become one, especially when David is confronted in Munich by associates of his dead doppelganger.
But Antonioni isn't interested in Hollywood suspense conventions, and The Passenger has a languid, unhurried quality that often meanders far too much in its first half. David never seems to be in much physical danger, although he's nearly always in danger of the metaphysical sort. Things pick up about halfway through when David meets a mysterious woman (Schneider) who tags along on his travels and serves as a sounding board for his crises of personality and identity.
Even when he threatens to fall into an abyss of navel-gazing, Antonioni never fails to offer up striking images, from David leaning over a gondola with his arms outstretched, looking as if he's flying, to his unnamed female companion sitting in the back of a convertible, reveling in the liberating feeling of wind and speed. The most memorable image, and indeed the best moment in the entire film, is the astounding penultimate shot, a seven-minute single take slowly moving from David's hotel room into the street and back, which distills all of Antonioni's ideas into one indelible demonstration of cinematic mastery.