I came to Antonioni later in life, by way of The Passenger (1975) with its sun-drenched stretches of conversation, its slow, detective-like process of uncovering the great blank that was the 1970s. The blank generation, but without the screaming. If punk condensed the malaise into 2-minute punches, then Jack Nicholson in The Passenger stretched it out until his long-take death that famously ended the movie.
But until then, there was the sun."What are you running away from?" she asks. "Turn your back to the front seat," he answers. And then, she sees the answer:
Then, at the table in the sun, more conversation:
"I think I'm going to be a waiter in Gibraltar."
"Too obvious."
"Maybe a novelist in Cairo."
"Too romantic."
"How about a gun runner?"
"Too unlikely?"
No options, in a decade of no options. The only thing that awaits him, now, is the bed (like in Mulholland Drive) that he will die in. I know that Antonioni is often described as a filmmaker who explored alienation, and whose techniques reinforced this. But there is such a brightness to films like The Passenger, such a flooding of light, like that you might get right before an eclipse, right before it all starts--as it always does--to go very, very dark.
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