Blog From The Bench

Venue: E Street Theater, Washington DC

Early on, Jack Nicholson's character says that he prefers men to landscapes, and by this point in his career Antonioni would expect his audience to recognize that he himself prefers landscapes; the vistas here, both natural and man-made and combinations thereof, are mostly arid, rocky, and forbidding (although we get Gaudi and some middle-class interiors as well), evoking the inability of both individuals and political entitites to know, understand, and connect far more effectively than the awkwardly written and acted story, which plays like second-rate Hitchcock. What dismayed me was the amount of space that the plot takes up, at least compared to L'Avventura and Blow-Up, movies whose plots are so digressive and elongated that they stop being arty thrillers and become something much more unsettling; The Passenger reaches these hights in the last reel, which is awesome in both the traditional and colloquial senses, but the rest often feels like mildly tedious buildup. You have to wonder why Antonioni kept filming this kind of story: was it a commercial wish to maintain the audience that had enjoyed his previous films, a genuine interest in the philosophical implications of the mystery story, a perverse desire to continue beating the dead horse of cinematic convention? You can't rule out the kind of perversity that despair produces: there's no consolation here, and Jack's story about the blind man is, for a visual artist, about as self-lacerating as you can get.