618
PARTISAN REVIEW
Antonioni had paid more attention to it. But no.
He
is interested in land–
scapes . He just can 't figure out what to do with the men in them. In
The
Passenger, Antonioni'spaysage mora/ise
has simply fallen apart . On the one
hand , we get landscapes-very pretty ones. One the other-in a totally dis–
conected , unresonant way-we get moralism, guzzling down its sententious–
ness like so much gin. The result is-precisely nothing. One simply does not
believe anything in this movie. One is told that a disaffected BBe journalist
named David Locke, on assignment in Africa, decides on a lonely impulse of
despair to switch passports, possessions, and destinies with the busy gun–
runner, Robertson , suddenly dead in the wretched hotel room next to his . But
not for one moment do we forget that the man up there on the screen is
neither Locke, nor Robertson, but a very famous movie actor named Jack
Nicholson . After Locke-Robertson-Nicholson begins rushing around Europe ,
missing appointments in the dead gunrunner's purloined datebook , not once
do we believe, on any terms, a single adventure that befalls him, be it an
international incident or the discovery of a cute French gamine , who thinks
him her heart's desire . We don 't even believe Robertson has died. We are
aware , every second , that his ' .body" in the hotel room is an actor holding his
breath. The actor, by the way, is very good at holding his breath .
What on earth ever happened to the Antonioni who made
L 'Avventura?
That most painful aspect of
The Passenger
is the hysteria one feels running
through it, the same hysteria that ran through
Zabnskie Point,
the hysteria of
an artist who once made
L
'Avventura,
desperately trying to remember " how
in
hell
did I do it? " Antonioni reads the magazines, he knows it had some–
thing to do with landscapes, narrative disjunction , alienation-so try, try
again_ I sense-ofcourse I cannot prove it-that the critical community shares
some part of the responsibility for Antonioni's current confusions . There is
some evidence that Antonioni pays all too serious attention to his critics, who ,
ofcourse, have worked overtime on him. (For example, Peter Wollens, a film
reviewer and author of a book on film and semiotics , is coauthor of
The
Passenger's
literally unspeakable screenplay .) If I am right, Antonioni 's
recent disasters stand as dreadful testimony to the dangers of an artist be–
lieving his critics.
When it appeared,
L 'Avventura
was so very stylish that everyone as–
sumed that for that reason it must represent some authentic new departure in
cinematic style. In addition, the film's aesthetic tact , the all but ungraspable
delicacy of its theme , its cool mastery ofstrategies that seemed at once baffling
and satisfying, led everyone to the conclusion (a typical critic 's error if ever
there was one) that Antonioni must, therefore, be an artist of ideas . Time has
proved both assumptions obviously , embarrassingly wrong . In retrospect , it
seems more accurate to say that
L 'Avventura's
achievement was based not on
