Word: deserted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...symbols, some of them easier to work with than others, most pliable and multi-facilitating. And for a home base, we get Antonioni's old favorite, that most accommodating of all vehicles, the desert...
...desert dominates The Passenger--it seems to sprawl everywhere except for the lush, over-cultivated scenes in England. A key to Antonioni's method, the desert offers no insights in the Eureka-gents-now-you-understand-the-movie sense. It serves, besides suggesting a million metaphorical possibilities, simply as a stage: anything Antonioni dots it with becomes the thing on which the audience must focus its attention. And so the film crawls along agonizingly, a slow methodical parade of pictures to be explored. The pace itself gives Antonioni's existential tendencies time to flower into unmistakable statements, momentary images which...
...strike almost everyone who sees them differently. They rely on the hope that the viewer cares about the problems Antonioni poses and cares to do the work he demands. Those who don't may end up giggling all through the movie, through its empty spots, through its stretches of desert. Those who do will be all the more rewarded by the fact that The Passenger doesn't come wrapped, bowed and ready for easy discard...
SOMEWHERE in the second act, when Peer Gynt is stranded in the desert and offers half his kingdom for a horse, the stagehands accommodate him with a painted wooden creature that might have had trouble fitting through the gates of Troy. As its hulk lumbers forward, all eyes turn to the horse, Peer pauses, afraid that the thing might suddenly topple over, and you begin to wonder who's in control--the props or the actors...
...receiving some form of medical or welfare aid; 4 million near the poverty levels; and 20 million paying taxes as close to the maximum tax as is acceptable in free enterprise." Plans are already afoot to isolate some 64,000 refugees in two aging Army outposts in the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley...