An embankment of stones in a Saharan village. A sparsely populated rural landscape. White adobe buildings loom.
From the right-hand corner of the frame, a leafless tree dapples shadow onto the metallic ground, and a man and an abaya-cloaked woman drift toward an approaching Land Rover bumbling along. A small crowd, mostly children, collects around the vehicle as a white man disembarks into the bright afternoon. The shaky, handheld camera peruses the scene from a distance, so far away as to be almost furtive. Whatever pleasantries are exchanged between the man and the villager are in French. As soon as the camera lands on this interaction it drifts away again to a brick wall, eclipsing the drama of the visitor’s entrance entirely.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) is about drift. It is a film uninterested in fidelity to a three-act structure or the interiority of its characters. Frequently, it is equally uninterested in its characters’ actions onscreen. “Antonioni’s style derealizes cinematic reality,” Slawomir Maslon writes in his book Secret Violences: The Political Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni. Rather than clearly depict the cinematic reality before us, Antonioni recurrently obfuscates, evades, ignores. To be clear, derealized is dissimilar from disembodied. Derealization suggests detachment. Yet one can be detached and still possess a subjectivity which succumbs to its own boredom or dreams. The janky, handheld camera foregrounds embodiment (a human touch), though the focus is impartial, like a newsreel taking in the whole environment, all the constituents that constitute this world. This style, more akin to a documentary than a narrative feature film, is termed cinéma vérité, the approach made famous in America by the Maysles brothers and D. A. Pennebaker for their use of lightweight cameras and spontaneous action rather than scripted scenes. The stylistic influence of cinéma vérité positions us to assume everything we see on screen as truth. But in The Passenger the term truth is barbed, and highly suspect.
I have been not-quite watching The Passenger repeatedly for weeks. So often while it plays, I feel my own gaze straying from the screen to my phone to my apartment, the latter cramped and cluttered compared to Antonioni’s oneiric desertscape. The Illizi Province of Algeria, where the film was shot, is meant to represent Chad in The Passenger’s opening; my apartment, full of unread books, is meant to represent a critic’s home. No one tells you when you’re becoming a critic that self-reflection will be part of your praxis. I would give anything right now to assume the role of someone else.
The Passenger follows an Anglo-American journalist named David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson, who’s on assignment in Saharan Africa. In his desolate hotel, Locke meets an English arms dealer named David Robertson who looks a little like him. As neighbors and fellow Englishmen in a foreign country, the two men share drinks and conversation. Robertson finds the desert beautiful. Locke prefers men to landscapes. Both of them, however different, find an affinity in one another.
Though we’re uncertain of how long, some amount of time elapses before Locke finds himself in the Saharan village, lost.
After leaving the village, Locke’s Land Rover sinks into the desert sands on his journey back to his hotel. The vehicle is stuck, like Locke. Under a merciless sun and a bright blue sky, Locke drops to his knees, prostrate, as if praying. “I don’t care!” he wails to high noon before breaking into sobs. The camera pans away from Locke to a wide shot of the dusty, rose-colored dunes. Unlike Locke, the camera prefers landscapes to men and all their tandem histrionics.
I’m drawn to Antonioni’s formal motif of drift as much as I’m lulled by its recurrence. This camera movement seems to belie concentration or close reading. Even when there’s action, Antonioni pulls our attention elsewhere. But perhaps this capacious gaze is a generous one. There is more to a movie than just its principal actors and there is more to a narrative than what occurs on screen. Antonioni reminds us of the importance of what lies beyond the frame. He centralizes the periphery, then elides it, again and again and again.