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Michelangelo Antonioni made a series of films in the 1960s that helped define arthouse culture here in the U.S. L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, and The Red Desert all combined spectacular formal compositions of architecture and landscapes with narratives dominated by existential ennui. While the French New Wave was having fun inverting genre films, Ingmar Bergman was exploring the spiritual dark night of the soul, and fellow Italian Federico Fellini was channeling himself through the charismatic actor Marcello Mastroianni, you could argue that Antonioni was making pure cinema that never catered to audience expectations. Even the 1966 movie Blow Up, which is probably Antonioni's most accessible film of that decade, is a puzzle when you first see it and only gets marginally more understandable on second and third viewings.

Still, as the decade of Us switched to the decade of Me (that's the '70s for you young 'uns) an interesting thing happened to many arthouse directors. They suddenly became commercial, or at least commercially popular with big American actors. Marlon Brando worked with Bernardo Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris, Jacqueline Bisset teamed up with Francois Truffaut in Day for Night, and Fellini took on Donald Sutherland. The biggest, and strangest, combination, though, was Antonioni and Jack Nicholson in the 1975 feature The Passenger. Not that Nicholson had avoided difficult films. In fact, he had just turned down a lead role in The Sting because he didn't want to do anything too commercial at the time. But Antonioni's brand of existentialism seems almost antithetical to Nicholson's brooding intensity.

In that respect, The Passenger, playing here in Chicago for the first time in years, is a fascinating clash of styles. Antonioni's protagonists usually do nothing. They contemplate the world, stare blankly into space, and watch it collapse around them. It's hard to imagine a Nicholson character surrendering to his inner angst. He's played numerous existential outlaws, but he's always an outlaw that does something, not one who sits around pondering his own meaningless existence. In The Passenger, he plays a tv journalist named Locke who's in an African desert country filming interviews with local dictators and rebel guerillas. The film opens with him heading into the desert but forced to wait for various guides who either can't or won't take him where he needs to go. In frustration, he tries to drive by himself, only to get stuck in a sand dune. Yes, it's a metaphor.

Locke sees a strange way out of his situation, though, when a fellow European named Robertson suddenly dies in an adjacent hotel room. Coincidentally, Robertson looks amazingly like Nicholson, so Locke commandeers the dead man's passport and belongings, notifies the hotel that it's Locke who's died, and heads back to Europe posing as Robertson. It doesn't matter to Locke that he soon finds out Robertson is a middle-man who hooks up African rebels with the latest in guns and ammo. Locke had become completely disillusioned with the politics he'd been covering, so why not play the game instead of just observing it? The irony is that despite Locke's best efforts, he never gets to play the game. The one conversation he has with guerilla intermediaries (taking place in a church after a wedding, natch) is cryptic and bizarre, and his other meetings end with him waiting for people who never show up. It's not quite as frustrating as digging out of a sand dune, but the perspective is similar.

The only excitement in Locke's life comes from his dealings with women. His ex-wife, who didn't care about him until he died, becomes obsessed with trying to track down this Robertson character (who she thinks is alive and had something to do with Locke's death). Then there's the Passenger, or The Girl as she's referred to in the credits. She's apparently a random woman whom Locke runs into, and whose own life is so dull that she's happy to accompany Locke on his apparently-but-not-actually exciting adventures. The movie intimates that the Girl might be involved in the gun-running, but that's never entirely clear. What is clear is that the actress Maria Schneider (who plays her) is just as much an embodiment of male wish fulfillment as she was in Last Tango in Paris, though with considerably less nudity.

The problem with The Passenger is that despite Nicholson's sexy, laconic performance (he's great, of course) and Antonioni's rigorous direction (the desert landscapes almost put David Lean to shame), the movie's themes aren't compelling. There's too much star power and plot for the philosophy to truly take hold, as it does in Antonioni's better '60s efforts. But Antonioni's preoccupations hinder any real narrative development. Let's put it this way: no movie that features gun running, assumed identities, car chases, and beautiful women should be this tedious.

Nonetheless, there is one reason to see The Passenger besides Nicholson's acting and Antonioni's compositions, and it might be worth the proverbial cost of admission. The final shot is a long take that starts out in a motel room, looks out onto the action outside as the movie's various characters come in and out of the frame, then slowly but incredibly leaves the room and goes outside and turns around to see what's happening inside the motel room. It's a spectacular scene, and maybe even more impressive than the famous opening take in Touch of Evil. Any cinephile should jump at the chance to see it on the big screen. Too bad I can't say the same for the rest of the film. It opens this Friday at the Music Box theater. 

J. Robert Parks