Tag: passport

The Passenger

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The story is deceptively simple. A globetrotting TV journalist checks in to a hotel and meets a stranger. A few hours later, the stranger is dead in his hotel room having died of natural causes. Swapping his own photograph with that of the dead man on the latter’s passport to assume his identity the journalist commits identity theft, a familiar phrase today which was not in use when the film was made. In the dead man’s shoes, the journalist travels round the world to attend a series of appointments the dead man had set up.

You can’t imagine this plot working in today’s world of computerised records and the internet. Stealing another person’s passport would require considerably more technical expertise than merely moving a pasted physical photo from one passport to another. And there must be far more identity checks in place in airports today than there were back then. But in the paper records, pre-internet world of the 1970s, it’s plausible enough.

There are many reasons to see The Passenger. One is Antonioni’s eye, his visual sense of style. The film is splendid to look at. It feels as if one way or another a considerable amount of work went into location scouting, with many of the locations so cinematogenic you feel as if he could have merely pointed a camera at them and that would have been enough. However Antonioni does a lot more than that, including staging a lengthy unbroken shot towards the end which will likely take your breath away. The Italian director has a commendably unhurried sense of pace: the whole is harmoniously edited.

Then there are the two leads. Jack Nicholson appeared in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) around the same time. Those two career high points are easily matched by his very different performance here as a man very clearly out of his depth passively moving forward towards wherever events will take him. Although she doesn’t appear until quite some way into the proceedings, Maria Schneider, shortly after the controversial Last Tango In Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972), here shows herself made for the cinema, a presence that lights up the screen whenever she appears on camera. Together on the screen, these two actors are nothing less than iconic.

As a thriller, I wouldn’t particularly recommend The Passenger: it takes a long time to get anywhere and proceeds at its own leisurely pace. On the other hand, the film is peerless as an essay on identity and self-deceit the film. For seeing iconic actors on the screen, it can’t be bettered. And as a stylish piece of cinema, something to wash over you in the auditorium, it’s a treat.

The Passenger is out in the UK on Friday, January 4th. For anyone wishing to find out more about the director, BFI Southbank host a comprehensive season entitled Antonioni: Confronting The Modern World With Style from Friday, February 1st to Sunday, February 24th.

Extinction (Extinção)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conversations. In Russian. At border checkpoints between countries in the former Soviet Union. And at places in between. Monuments, striking architecture. Much less arresting locations, too. Some of these conversations are accompanied by black and white footage. Very occasionally, someone’s lips move and you see and hear them speaking at the same time, but most of the time, you don’t. Other conversations are accompanied by blank, dark blue footage, nothing but the uniform colour on the screen (unless you count the white, English language subtitles), just people talking on the soundtrack. Monologues discussing various aspects of modern, Russian history and the ethnic diversity of the countries bordering it also appear on the soundtrack along with unsettling music ranging from avantgarde orchestral to drone.

Kolja comes from Transnistria, formerly part of the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic (now a self-proclaimed republic, not recognised by any other countries). He has a passport, so he’s travelling, the interpreter on a film crew making a film about Russia and borders and ethnicity. It might be this film or it might be a film we never see. For much of the time we see him driving to or from Eastern Bloc border checkpoints or being questioned by officials in rooms about his nationality and loyalty. Although it clearly has its own identity, with which he identifies, Transnistria doesn’t appear to be recognised by any other country.

As Kolja crosses over and waits in between a seemingly endless series of borders between one country and another – actually five in number – the very idea of nationality, of separate nation states, seems to diminish in significance to the point of evaporation into thin air. Although when at one point he dismisses the suggestion that he might want to live in the EU, you can see him complying with the idea of borders inside his head. A citizen of nowhere? A citizen of somewhere?

In places shots are held for some considerable length of time, whether it’s the opening shot of Kolja’s face against a background of white walls in a waiting room somewhere as we hear him questioned at length by border official on the soundtrack or a passenger seat shot of him driving through nondescript territory.

Much of the time, nothing really happens. It’s a lot like the effect of 2001, watching someone perform mundane tasks or, more often here, wait around for officials to perform their functions so the people in question can move on. As I wrote of Kubrick’s SF outing on its recent reissue, there’s something quite hypnotic about the mundane. If anything, that effect is even stronger here – the vivid black and white images lend an almost dreamlike quality to the whole thing and there are no dramas to suddenly leap out of the humdrum.

It’s barely even a narrative, more like a very strange and empty yet somehow unforgettable surreality, memorable as much for the places in which events (don’t) occur as it is for the things people say and the ideas that float around within their words. At their most focused and extreme, the content of those words explore incidences of genocide under Stalin.

Anyone looking for cinematic equivalents might recognise the feeling of the languorous waking dream from Tarkovsky narratives (Ivan’s Childhood/1962, Stalker/1979) or the bleak architectural images and mom-synchronised voice over of early, pre-feature film Cronenberg (Stereo/1969, Crimes Of The Future/1970). But again, both these examples look positively action-packed by comparison with Extinction – a film which might, just might, be destined for cult status.

Nation states seemingly have mechanisms to exert control over people, but in the end that really doesn’t matter in vision of the female Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas: no matter how much states try to confine those who reside in or pass through them, people and their words, thoughts and consciousness potentially transcend all that.

Extinction is out in the UK on Friday, July 20th. Watch the film trailer below: