TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
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The Passenger
Professione: reporter
Michelangelo Antonioni
1975 - Italy / France / Spain - 2h06
While David Locke, a well-known but somewhat dispirited Anglo-American reporter, is in Africa, in a hotel lost in the desert, he discovers his roommate, a certain Robertson, has died in the room. Locke decides to take on his identity and goes to the appointments scheduled in his new character's agenda. He soon realises that the person he has identified is in fact an arms dealer.
Antonioni's sixteenth feature film, Professione: reporter (The Passenger), revolves around a journalist at a crossroads: disaffected by politics, by his profession and by an alienating world. He switches identities with a dead man to go off in search of a newfound and dangerous freedom. The character's disenchantment matches that of Antonioni, who was a journalist for a while, and who had just returned from China where he had made a documentary for the official government that was “too” well received. In this film he shook up his approach consisting in going to look for the familiar in the far reaches of the globe. It is not surprising that Raymond Depardon is an admirer of the film.
CAST AND CREW
Cast : Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff, Ambroise Bia
Screenplay : Mark Peploe, Enrico Sannia, Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography : Luciano Tovoli
Sound : Franca Silvi, Fausto Ancillai, Cyril Collick
Editing : Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Arcalli
Production : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Les Films Concordia
French distributor : Park Circus