A Journey on the Screen
Antonioni‘s frenzied psychological drama highlighting one of Jack Nicholson’s best interpretations of a reporter on the run.
David Locke, an English reporter and news personality played by Jack Nicholson returns to his hotel room in an unnamed African desert country after unsuccessfully trying to contact rebel forces. Finding that a businessman acquaintance has died in a mysterious way, he switches identities with him.
Now traveling under the name Robertson, Locke keeps the dead man’s appointment in Munich, where he discovers that the “businessman” was a dealer in illegal arms. The rebel representatives Locke couldn’t find in Africa are now eager to finish a smuggling deal.
Locke takes their money and drives a rental car to Barcelona. There he meets a young woman (Maria Schneider) and uses her to evade pursuers from his past life: His wife Rachel and a fellow newsman want to contact Robertson to learn more about Locke’s death. Unfortunately, hired killers are using the searchers to locate Robertson — Locke — and fulfill their contract.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy, Spain, France 1975 – 126 min. – in English
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LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
MORE INFO
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
After working on the screenplay of Un pilota returns (1942) by Rossellini and working as assistant-director to Marcel Carné, Antonioni tested his skills as director with People of the Po River (Gente del Po) (1943-1947), his first documentary. His first feature film was Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore) (1950), an acute analysis of a couple in crisis: other films that followed include “Camille without camelia (La signora senza camelie)” (1952), a pitiless dissection of the world of cinema, and The Girlfriends (Le amiche) (1955), an anguished interpretation of Pavese’s lovely tale Tra donne sole.
Already in these works we can clearly see what were to become the defining traits of this filmmaker from Italy’s Romagna region: the difficulty of establishing real interpersonal relationships, the elusiveness of reality, the disorientation felt by individuals in the face of a cold, dehumanized neo-capitalist society. His breaking away from neorealist chronicling is evident and becomes clear in The Cry (Il grido) (1954), which shifts the theme of existential malaise from a bourgeois setting to a working class one, choosing as protagonist a working man who opts to commit suicide to end the misery resulting from the unhappy ending of a long-standing relationship.
From this point on, Antonioni’s works follow the trend of decisive renewal, of both language and content, that was then tangible in Italian filmmaking: The Adventure (L’avventura) (1960), “The night (La notte)” (1961), “The eclipse (L’eclisse)” (1962), Red Desert (Deserto rosso) (1964), which often take the form of bizzarre murder mysteries, place female characters at the center of stories marked by loss, let-downs, dismay.
The continuing course of his artistic career failed to dispel any doubts, quite the opposite: the British setting chosen for Blow-up (1967) is well matched in terms of gaudy superficial attractiveness to the American Zabriskie Point (1970), a eulogy to the LSD counterculture complete with apocalyptic ending.
Only in The passenger (Professione: reporter) (1972), and in particular in the seven minutes of the amazing final scene, do we glimpse once again the old mastery.
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