439 - The Passenger, Italy/Spain/France, 1975. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Thursday, March 15, 2018

439 - The Passenger, Italy/Spain/France, 1975.  Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Profession: Reporter.

Location: Chad.

Subject: Guerrilla war.

David Locke is locked up.  Inside himself.

David Locke is a journalist.  He is here to interview rebel fighters.  He is making a documentary on the civil war in Chad.

He drives a teal blue Land Rover with a white roof.  A real one.  Not the kind sold by luxury dealers to high-end suburban clientele.  But one made for real off-road travel.  A 1971 Land Rover Series III 109.  A 1-ton off-road vehicle with a 109" wheelbase.  Heavy-duty.  They do not make them anymore.  They only make Range Rovers and Discoveries now.  Soft cars.  For image.

He drives.  He stops and asks a woman for directions to . . . somewhere whose name we do not hear.

He enters a building and stands before two men.  He offers one an American cigarette.  They never speak.

Another man squats before a fence with a woman standing next to him.  He signals.  He also wants an American cigarette.  David Locke gives him one.  They never speak either.

When Locke gets back into his car he finds a boy sitting in the passenger seat.  He asks him if he speaks English.  The boy says nothing.  Locke starts driving.  Then the boy, as if knowing where he is going, gives him directions.  Turn left.  Locke does.  On down, the boy tells him to stop.  He does.  The boy gets out and walks away in the direction from which they have just come.  Locke sees another man ahead in the distance.

He puts a sun hat on his head and retrieves a canteen.  He sits in the shade of a car and drinks.

A man on a camel passes by.  Locke waves at him.  He turns his head and looks but says nothing.  He keeps going.  The rider does not straddle the camel as a horse rider does, but he rests his feet in front of him on the camel's neck.

The camel has its own way of walking.  Different from a horse's.  Different from a giraffe's.  Different from an elephant's.  One suddenly desires a new Eadweard Muybridge to emerge and film studies of animals walking and running.

Did the old Eadweard Muybridge ever film a camel?

One look and we see he did, but the Eadweard Muybridge camel does not move in the same way that the Antonioni camel does.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_Camel_Racking.gif

So let me be more precise.  Did Eadweard Muybridge ever film a dromedary?  A search for that seems to produce negative results.

The camel in the movie moves its rear-left leg forward and then its front-left leg forward.  Then its rear-right leg forward and then its front-right leg forward.

The man on the camel passes on, leaving David Locke to stand in the sand and wind, swatting flies.

Another man emerges from a hut out of nowhere.  He begins to guide Locke up a sandy and rocky mountain.  He carries Locke's camera case.  Locke carries his sound case.  Or maybe the other way around.  Locke asks him how long it will take (on foot) to get where they are going (a military camp).  The man tells him 12 hours.  More or less.  In short sleeves in that sun.  Locke seems undaunted.  He is ready to go.

When they get to the top, the man sees seven men on seven camels passing below.  They are wearing camouflage.  The man pulls Locke back to hide.  Then he abandons him.  No.  No.  And walks away.

Locke, now back in his Land Rover, drives more deeply into the desert.  Until he gets his tires stuck in a rut from which they will never break free.  He tries to dig it out.  He fails.  He curses.  He abandons his vehicle.  He is about to abandon his reporting.  Cut to:

David Locke walks back to his hotel room.  He stumbles into an abandoned town and wanders into the building.  "Hotel.  Restaurant.  Bar."  He asks for water.  He turns on the shower.  The man brings him water in a glass bottle.

"There's no soap."
"No, Sir."

The man simply agrees with him and exits.  There really is no soap.  Locke rolls his eyes.

He leaves the shower running and crosses the hall to check on his new acquaintance.

Robertson.

He walks into Robertson's room.

Robertson is dead on his belly on the bed.

He turns him over.  He sits and thinks.  He makes a decision.  He pulls out Robertson's calendar and looks at it.  He leans over Robertson and looks at his face.  His face approaches Robertson's face.  A doppelganger moment.  The two men look strikingly similar.  Almost as if Jack Nicholson is looking down at himself rather than Charles Mulvehill.  A three-dimensional mirror.

Mulvehill!

As in Chinatown (1974)?

Yes.  As in Chinatown.  The character Claude Mulvihill (with an i) in Chinatown was in fact named after producer Charles Mulvehill (with an e), who produced two of Jack Nicholson's movies--The Last Detail (1973) and the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).  The Last Detail was directed by Hal Ashby, and Mulvehill also produced Ashby's films Harold and Maude (1971), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978), Being There (1979), Second-Hand Hearts (1981), and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986).  So it is no surprise that Mulvehill's name was referenced in Bound for Glory as well.  The church sign next to which the pastor stands reads that the pastor's name is "C. Mulvehill."

Charles Mulvehill is a producer and not an actor.  But he looks so much like Jack Nicholson that he was cast in this role.

And now the film begins.

David Locke gathers Robertson's belongings.  His pen.  His belt.  His wallet.  His clothes.  His keys.  His passport.  His itinerary.  A plane ticket to Munich.  A note for Box 58.  His cigarettes.  David lights one.

And begins his transformation.

He stands in his red plaid shirt that he has been wearing up to now.  We tilt up to the ceiling fan.  We tilt back down.  He is now wearing Robertson's solid blue, long-sleeved shirt.

He picks up Robertson's phone and calls the front desk.  He inquires about flights.  There are only two flights a week.  The next flight is in three days.

We have been hearing David Locke's shower still running across the hall this whole time.

He returns to his room.  Wearing the blue shirt.  Carrying the plaid shirt.  Cut to:

The ceiling fan in David's room.

We tilt down and see David, shirtless, sitting down and studying the two passports side by side.

A knock on the door.  Come in.  I saw your light on.  I thought you might like a drink.  Oh, yes.  I saw you on the plane.  Come in.  I'll get some glasses.  My name's Robertson.  David Robertson.

David Locke.  David Robertson.  David, meet David.  David, meet David.  David, become David.

David Locke still sits alone.  What came through the door was not a man but a memory.  We hear their flashback from the past as we watch the present.  David Locke removes his own passport photo from his passport and places it on David Robertson's passport.

His recorder sits playing in the red chair.  A kind of metallic recliner, like an old-fashioned barber's chair.  Is this memory actually playing?  Did Locke record their conversation when Robertson first came over and introduced himself?  Was it live or is it Memorex?

We get the sense that maybe Locke is listening to Robertson's voice for two reasons--to recall the details of his life that he shared as well as to get the pitch and timbre of his voice.  Locke can use both in the future.

In the conversation Robertson reveals that he knows who Locke is.  He has read his articles.  Locke tells him that he is almost done with his documentary.  He is only lacking making contact with the guerrillas.  He heard they were fighting up here now.  Some local farmers were recently arrested.  But Locke has been unable to find them.  He must have taken the wrong trail.

A statement about his life.

Robertson in turn reveals that he travels a lot.  He has been to Umbugbene, for example.  He finds the scenery beautiful.  And still.  A kind of waiting.  Locke says Robertson is unusually poetic for a businessman.  Robertson reveals that he has no family or friends--an important detail Locke will remember after Robertson dies--and that he has a weak heart and should not be drinking--revealing to us the reason why he dies.  They have another drink.

From the moment we cut to the tape recorder on the red chair, we do not cut again for awhile.  Watch this.

We pan to the right from the tape recorder, listening to the memory, to David Locke sitting alone and shirtless, his back sweating, his hair tussled, working on the passports.  He looks up and over to his left, out the open balcony window, and nods, as if looking at the memory.  We pan left to follow his point of view.  We pan past the red chair and across the light-blue wall until we frame up centered on the open window, the open window panes framing the window.  A living David Robertson walks into view.  He stops dead center with his back to us and looks out on the desert sand.  David Lock enters frame next to him, dressed in his plaid shirt, tucked in his olive fatigue pants, sweatless, clean, seemingly showered, his hair combed.  Locke joins Robertson and they continue talking, their words no longer on the tape recorder but live on the balcony.  We have gone from the present to the past, from recalling the memory to making the memory, from Locke in one state to Locke in another, from recorded sound in playback to live sync sound, without cutting.  A pan across time.  A pan back in time.  Jack Nicholson stepping into the past in a single take.

Michelangelo Antonioni has introduced something new to the cinematic world.  It is dazzling.

But why do it once when you can do it twice?

We cut from the window to the door and do it again.  The men keep talking, in the past, as they open the door and enter the room.  The room with the light-blue walls.  Robertson tells Locke he will be traveling the world.  He has a bad heart.  He should not be drinking.  Let us have another one.  We pan back to the right, and there is David Locke, sitting at the table, shirtless, sweating, his hair wet with sweat, listening to the conversation on tape as he works on the passports.  The sound shifts back from live sync sound to recorded sound in playback.

He listens as Robertson claims in the end every airport, taxi, and hotel is all the same.  He listens as he himself disagrees, saying it is we who remain the same.  He smiles and nods at his own words.  "We translate every situation, every experience, into the same old codes.  We condition ourselves."

This conversation is key.  A key to open Locke.

Robertson asks if he means we are creatures of habit.

Locke says it is something like that.  "However hard you try, it stays so difficult to get away from your own habits."

To get away from your own habits.

The desire that drives Locke to become Robertson.  He wants to get away from his own habits.  He wants to become someone new.  To change.

Robertson points out that Locke deals in words and images, fragile things.  But Robertson brings merchandise.  Things that are concrete.  They understand that.

He gives him his itinerary.  London.  Munich.  With that and his calendar, Locke will know where to go.

He moves the body into his own room.  Puts on the blue shirt.  Robertson's watch.

The transformation is complete.

He tells the man at the front desk that the man in Room 11 is dead.  That David Locke is dead.  He, the artist formally known as Locke, now Robertson, goes outside.

Now Locke is free.  Free from his old life.  Free from the marriage to a wife who does not love him and who is with another man.  Free from a career that leaves him stranded in the desert.  Free to be a new man, a man with no friends and no family.  Free to be and to do whatever he wants.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

What happens when his wife hears the news and in her grief wishes to restore what was lost?  What happens when she and his producer producer come looking for Robertson to find out what happened to David to gain understanding to help them grieve?

What happens when Robertson's business associates come calling?  When it turns out that the merchandise he delivers are guns smuggled to the rebels?  And when Locke finds out the hard way that Robertson is beset with entanglements with dangerous and unhappy people?

Locke is less free, more locked up, than ever.

Wandering from place to place.  With a new companion.  A girl.  Who seems to get what he is after as she herself is a passenger on this strange search for freedom.

The Passenger was co-written by Mark Peploe, who was born in Kenya.  He won an Oscar for adapted screenplay for The Last Emperor (1988), another film directed by a great Italian director (Bernardo Bertolucci).  He wrote for Bertolucci again on Little Buddha (1994).

IMDb does not list it but multiple other sources state that the film was also co-written by a film theorist named Peter Wollen.  A man with a background in structuralism and semiotics.  Something I studied in my former days in Graduate English.  In 1969 he had published a book entitled Signs and Meaning in Cinema, a seminal work in film studies and an apt proving ground for his work in this resolutely philosophical film.

The Passenger was filmed in Bloomsbury and Notting Hill in London, England; Munich, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Andalusia, Spain.

The desert scenes, the scenes that take place in Chad, were filmed in Algeria.

As passenger David Locke wanders more deeply into the maze of identity, he gets lost in ever deepening layers of incertitude.

He will find himself on the backside of nowhere, lying supine on an alien bed, quietly and unceremoniously immolated while the girl ambles about outside, while the camera ambles inside, and then outside, and then inside, passing through welded iron bars on the window in the seven-and-a-half-minute tour-de-force penultimate shot, climaxing anticlimactically in the drama, climaxing sensationally in the filmmaking, sometimes sitting completely still, suspended in mid-air, the window framed up front and center with ambient sonance our only sound.  Something happens outside in the background.  Something else happens.  We sit still, watching, hardly seeing, hardly hearing, finally penetrating the grille, slowly moving about outside, maybe hearing, maybe missing the signifying shot, finally returning, and seeing the results.

We are in the hands of an artist.  A philosopher.  A painter of images.  A writer of words.  Albeit sparse words.  Dropped words.  Unheard words.  Fully in touch with the alienation, the isolation, and the dread of modern man.

Jack Nicholson considers this his finest work.  In a film that came out shockingly after Chinatown.  And in the same year as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).  For here he stands so young.  So thin.  So fresh with future.  A future for Jack Nicholson.  No future for David Locke.

The 1970s saw several movie stars work with foreign directors in beautiful and serious art house films.  They were actors first.  Movie stars second.  An aftereffect.  A happenstance.

In a world that was changing.  In tectonic shifts.  Wrestling with the changes.  Grappling with what they meant.  Trying to adjust.  Trying to understand.

Where are those filmmakers today?  Where are those actors?

They are out there.  They are always out there.  Somewhere.

It is up to us to find them.

Or to become them.