ITALIAN MOVIE "Professione : reporter ( The Passenger )" at Italian Centre - 17th October, 2007

profession reporter italian movie poster 1975

  • Time : 6.30 pm
  • Duration : 126 min
  • Entry : Annual Membership Required
  • Year : 1975
  • About the Movie : Professione: reporter (The Passenger ) Davide Locke, a melancholy, depressed and jaded London television reporter ( portrayed by Jack Nicholson ) sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of Robertson, a stranger who has mysteriously died in a shared hotel room somewhere in Saharian Africa, not knowing that the man was a renowned arms smuggler. Running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing, Locke is much like Monica Vitti's Vittoria in L'eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask; he sees this switch as a last desperate chance to escape his old life and start anew. However, as he begins to take on the characteristics of his new persona, switching identities with the dead man, taking the man's passport (with his own photo swapped in), his luggage, and his appointment schedule, he understand his shady involvements: the decision becomes a risky one, which leads to an inevitable showdown. The script offers up a story which is almost Hitchcockian, but of a kind adaptable to Antonioni's very different metaphysic. Following Robertson's itinerary, David Locke meets up with a girl (the 'passenger' of the English title) and the pair is pursued across Europe (Gaudi’s Barcellona offer moments of pure visual joy) by the police and some shadowy Africans for whom Robertson had been a gun runner. Antonioni’s characteristic themes, such as the instability of identity and the fragility of relationships, are explored with unparalleled subtlety, and the film's finale is simply sublime - spectacular as in Zabriskie Point and emotionally intense as in L'avventura or The Eclipse. Defined as a political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L'avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. But, embracing Robertson's globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man's life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film's famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.)
ITALIAN MOVIE "Professione : reporter ( The Passenger )" at Italian Centre - 17th October, 2007 ITALIAN MOVIE "Professione : reporter ( The Passenger )" at Italian Centre - 17th October, 2007 Reviewed by rohit malik on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 Rating: 5

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