jefferino

I saw Antonioni's "The Passenger" in September or October 1976, at the beginning of my freshman year at Columbia. It was the first "art house film" I ever saw, well before I'd heard that term. I was from Cincinnati, where apparently they didn't have such things. I had just turned 19, or was about to. I was taking a writing class with Kenneth Koch, discovering Frank O'Hara and Rimbaud, and doing everything I could to peel or dissolve the suburban Midwestern scales from my eyes. In that pursuit, this movie was as important as the LSD I would drop for the first time a few weeks later. Not that it was hallucinatory—just the opposite, in fact… though in both cases, perhaps, it was "the visuals" that I liked best.

The film was playing at an auditorium on the Barnard campus, and I remember walking over there alone, being completely amazed by what I saw, and hurrying back to my Spartan dorm room to write excitedly about it in a notebook that is now long gone. I don't remember what I wrote, but I know it wasn't focused on Jack Nicholson, who plays a television reporter disillusioned with his life and work. Nor did I write much about the plot involving switched identities, riveting though it was. If I wrote about these things at all, it would have had to do with the way Antonioni de-emphasized Nicholson's movie star status and took the weight off a plot that would have been handled ponderously in a Hollywood movie, accompanied by ridiculous, tension-building background music. (I'd seen "Jaws" just the year before, which suddenly felt like ages ago.)

In fact, everything in "The Passenger" had a different emphasis than it did in the movies I had grown up seeing; everything about it felt refreshingly "un-American." Nothing was explained: I was as clueless about what was going on as Nicholson's character and, like him, had to figure things out as I went along—discovering, with him, that he'd taken on the life of a gunrunner in Africa (like Rimbaud!). The film's pacing was slow, giving me time to think and, especially, to look. I was astonished by the long stretches of silence during which no one spoke at all. The minimalist approach made the movie feel not smaller but more expansive, making room for something else, which filled me with a calm excitement: beauty.

I remember being struck, in the early scene in which Nicholson's character breaks down, by the gorgeous shots of the salmon-colored dunes against the blue sky in the saturated light of the African desert—then, in the scene where Nicholson's character changes identities with the dead man in the room across the hall, by the turquoise walls of the hotel hallway he drags the body through, and by the contrasting yellow doors. If you haven't seen the movie, this must sound crazy, but these, I think, are the things I wrote about in my notebook. And I'm sure I wrote about the shot of Nicholson from above, leaning out the window of an aerial tram and slowly flapping his arms like wings above the shimmering blue water of Barcelona's harbor. And the shot of Maria Schneider kneeling backwards in the red leather back seat of a convertible, spreading her arms and smiling as the plane trees lining both sides of a country road flicker by, seemingly without end. And the long, penultimate shot in which the camera (instead of focusing on the murder taking place) seems to move right through the bars of a hotel room window out into a dusty town square like something from a de Chirico painting.

Of course, this would have all been written with the exuberance of my nineteen-year-old self, and I'm sure that notebook entry, if I read it now, would induce both nostalgia and embarrassment. I wasn't inclined to interpret these images so much as bask in the way they opened me up to another way of seeing. When I watch the movie now, in middle age, I notice many other things, among them the theme of not being able to escape oneself. But one of the things I'm glad I can't escape, or at least forget, is the intensity of my first encounter.

First published in "New Ohio Review," copyright Jeffrey Harrison.

Wrong move, indeed, and currently rated way too high above (7.1 as I write this). Wenders is one of my favorite directors, but this is the weak link in his Road Trilogy. Since the three movies are not directly connected, you can skip right from "Alice in the Cities" (wonderful) to "Kings of the Road" (a masterpiece).

I always go to a Terrence Malick movie hoping to find once again something akin to the transcendent vision firmly grounded in the real world that I encountered when I first saw "Days of Heaven" (1978), a movie that combined gorgeous cinematography with a compelling plot. My hopes were dashed yet again with "Song to Song." The visual beauty is here, but the movie feels bloated, self-indulgent, and disconnected. Malick's technique of splicing together seemingly random footage overlaid with barely audible interior monologue has by now become formulaic, and he seems incapable, unwilling, or afraid to deliver a sustained scene in which characters actually exchange meaningful dialogue. And speaking of characters, one after another is introduced for no apparent reason, as if quantity could make up for the fact that none of them are developed, and their utter shallowness foreshortens any depths the movie might be trying to plumb. Finally, the movie went on so long that I left feeling too exasperated and exhausted to hold on to the shreds of visual beauty that it offered.