Word: antonioni
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Here, as in L'Avventura and La Notte, Antonioni's unsettled protagonist becomes increasingly the victim of a malaise that has no clear source. A television journalist named Locke (Jack Nicholson) is on assignment in a remote corner of the North African desert, trying to run to ground a story on some guerrilla fighters. The barren, blasted landscapes, the unknown language and ways of the few people Locke meets, are all transformed by Antonioni into coded messages of fate...
Locke, in any case, is lost. He does not find the guerrillas, and frustrations are so pressing that they bring him to his knees beside his stalled Land Rover, crying "All right, I don't care," into the vastness of the desert. In all this emptiness, Antonioni can make him seem hopelessly imprisoned...
...Passenger has the anxious ambience and level melancholy of Graham Greene's fiction, but unlike Greene, Antonioni lets the narrative ravel...
This is not necessarily a flaw. L'Avventura seemed initially to be about the search for a woman lost on an island. Then Antonioni -deliberately and to much controversy-abandoned this theme in favor of another, deeper one, a portrait of a whole inert society. In The Passenger, he lets go of the thriller elements midway and starts to concentrate on the growing relationship between Locke and a young tourist (Maria Schneider). But the change of focus does not deepen the picture as it did in L'Avventura. Instead, it diverts it while saying nothing new about Locke...
...looks to an Antonioni movie for fine and varied performances. He tends to depersonalize actors, although Nicholson manages a certain level of bleak intensity, and Maria Schneider is winning, despite an unrealized role...