Early in the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 landmark film, one man says to another, 'There's nowhere to run.' The man is talking about the massive and monstrously inhuman building complexes that are encroaching on the landscape and, by extension, everything with a pulse. But he is also giving voice to one of the modern age's consuming worries, namely that the world as we understood it, the world of infinite horizons and seemingly endless possibilities, no longer exists. Antonioni's greatest film, takes place more than a decade after 'L'Avventura,' and while it features a new cast of characters passing through different locations, speaking mostly in English, the similarities between the films are more striking than their differences. While the earlier film centers on the search for a missing woman, the later film follows a man, played by Jack Nicholson, who has deliberately gone missing, abandoning his wife, child, friends and job. In essence, 'The Passenger' is about a man on the run from himself, as well as a further exploration of a feeling, a mood, that Mr. Antonioni had, in discussing 'L'Avventura,' described with elegant simplicity: 'man is uneasy, something is bothering him.' What exactly is bothering David Locke, the title character in 'The Passenger,' is the big question. The film opens with Locke, played with a stunning admixture of emotional lethargy and sexual heat by Mr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
Categories |