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Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial, third-and-last English language film, “The Passenger” (1975), was one of the Festival’s much-anticipated events. And thanks to Sony Pictures Classics, we were blessed with a new, mint print that is 7 minutes longer than the 119-minute U.S version.

The film stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, and has been out of circulation ever since its initial distribution by MGM, a fate shared by the previous Antonioni film for Metro, “Zabriskie Point” (1972).

In case you wondered, Signor Antonioni, who suffered a massive stroke in 1996, which rendered him nearly speechless, remains remarkably active. He became involved with two film projects in 2004, at the age of 91. Maria Schneider has been making European films continually, on the basis of her fame in “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), although none, to my knowledge, has come to these shores.

Schneider was a gorgeous 22, when she became the passenger/accomplice of the title, while Nicholson was a still-handsome 37, when he signed on to Antonioni’s then-titled, “Profession: Reporter,” a year before winning the Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“The Passenger” created particular controversy because of its patchwork plot, as plot is alien to most of Antonioni’s films. In brief: world-weary TV journalist (Nicholson) swaps identities with a same-aged English “business man,” Robertson, who conveniently drops dead in his dingy African hotel room adjacent to the Sahara. The dead man proves to be an arms dealer for the rebel guerrillas, whom Locke was seeking in the desert without success. Locke’s life, you see, is a desert–and not a “Red Desert” either.

We are obliged to accept the device of Locke’s gluing his photo into the dead Brit’s passport without an official seal. But when you have the plot outlines of a potential thriller, with Locke caught in a death trap of jilted arm purchasers and an estranged wife hot in his pursuit, you might be looking for more than merely incidental suspense. However, Antonioni leaves such thrills to Hitchcock and his disciples. Instead, he peddles enigma and ennui and prophetic identity theft.
What Antonioni does better than anyone, in this pseudo-thriller of assumed identity, is to give us glorious location, location, location. From sandy Africa to London to Munich, to a number of fantastic houses by Gaudi in Barcelona, to Malaga, and other picturesque Spanish settings, this picture is everywhere scenic. (Antonioni got permission to film atop one of Gaudi’s landmarked, contoured buildings, which tourists are forbidden to visit.)
As to why Schneider is observed sitting on a bench in London, long before she hooks up with Nicholson in Barcelona and ultimately helps him make a getaway, I have no idea. It looks to me like an afterthought as carelessly wrought as the homemade British passport. Whenever a character is named solely “Girl” you can bet her role has not been well written, although “The Passenger” required the writing talents of Antonioni along with Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen.
I can only tell you that Schneider is the one who insists on Nicholson keeping all of the appointments in the arms merchant’s pocket-diary. Schneider claims that the arms buyers are true believers who must be aided–although Nicholson has no arms to deliver and he has, quixotically, accepted a large amount for a previous, undelivered shipment. So, by her curious sense of duty, Schneider leads Nicholson to his doom. That is, “the passenger” does the driver in.
The most celebrated sequence in the film is a sustained, seven-minute shot, encompassing Locke’s off-screen murder, during which the camera advances toward the wrought-iron grille of the couple’s Spanish hotel room, and the assassins’ car parks just beyond the grille’s frame. In this simultaneous “track and zoom” camera move that has, subsequently, been often repeated, a view of random, daily life occurs in blurred focus in the middle distance of the courtyard, while the grille fills the frame. That is, the camera, paradoxically, keeps its distance while it, simultaneously, closes in.
I realized, on second viewing, that there is a deliberate foreshadowing between Locke’s blurry footage of a rebel leader’s death by firing squad, and the blurred courtyard outside his window when he is offed by the pursuing arms dealers.
Shifting Nicholson’s corpse into another room of the whitewashed Spanish hotel echoes the movement of the dead arms-dealer’s body (clad in Locke’s plaid shirt) to a bed in the whitewashed African hotel. The movement of the two dead bodies gives the film a circular form.
Antonioni, in color, is such an exceptional aesthetic delight, that I can’t wait to own “The Passenger” on DVD. I think the contemporary Michelangelo is such a master of composition and form, that it nearly justifies his pretentiousness–if not the fathomless void of his cinema.

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“The Sun” (Russia/Italy/France/Switzerland) is an ironic title for one of the most dimly lit films I have ever seen, even though it concerns the Japanese divinity of the ‘rising sun’ god, the former Emperor Hirohito. “The Sun” concerns the last days of August 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur and the American forces entered Tokyo, and it reveals why the Emperor felt compelled to surrender his nation and to relinquish his divinity.
If you thought that the director and low-lighting cinematographer Aleksandr Sokurov’s previous film, “Russian Ark,” was an enthralling endurance contest, wait till you squint through this equally fascinating, behind-the-scenes study of the Emperor’s private life. (This is Sokurov’s fifth film at the Film Festival since 1992 and he is a genuine master.)

It only occurred to me after the film that de-saturated color stock fused into outright black and white was entirely appropriate for such a decent, but colorless mouse of a man as Hirohito.

The Emperor thinks of himself as all-too-mortal: There is no self-mythologizing for him. He berates himself for not standing up to his military and the national will to war, as he thought Japan had only a 50-50 chance of prevailing. (Of course, who knew about an atom bomb in 1941?) The Emperor mistakenly believed Hitler had a 100% chance of success in the European theater, but, then again, he worshipped Hitler.

Issey Ogata, who resembles the Emperor, gives a wonderful performance as a timid, lonely man, whose wife and sons have been relocated to the countryside for their safety. Solitary in his palace, the Emperor continues his daily marine studies, samples his foul breath, and looks through photo albums charting his family’s history and his secret adoration of film stars and the Fuhrer.
A treasured shot of Hitler, in tails, succeeding General von Hindenburg, parallels a miraculous scene in “The Sun” in which the Emperor, in top hat and tails, spends an evening with General MacArthur. In a revelatory moment, the American Caesar lights the Sun God’s first ever Havana cigar from his own. The imperious General did not stand on ceremony with fumbling puffers.

Remarkably, the Imperial Palace remained intact, although its surroundings were completely destroyed. The populace, which welcomed the war, is now obliged to live without doors or roofs or food, while the Emperor lives unscathed, in great luxury, tended by a host of servants.

I wondered whom the Emperor was addressing in dictating his surrender address to the nation. Only later did I learn that the invisible transcriber had committed hari-kari in response to the intolerable text he had just taken down. Imperial secretaries are amazingly discreet. Oh well, it’s a nighttime scene and the film is impossibly dark.

I am confident that good press will lead to an American distributor for this exceptional work.

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“Gabrielle” (France) is based on an obscure Conrad novella, “The Return.” But with its lavish, turn-of-the-century dinner parties, with many guests, many courses, and many servants, at the home of a wealthy Parisian industrialist publisher, one might have thought he was attending yet another soiree in Proustville among the Guermantes.
“Gabrielle” proves to be a lacerating two-hander depicting a dissolving marriage between a bored, cheating, withholding, yet financially dependent wife, Gabrielle (the sublime, though worn-looking Isabelle Huppert) and Jean, her uxorious, pompous husband (the imposing Pascal Greggory, dolled up in an obviously fraudulent, curly blond hairpiece).
These two great French stars go at it in Patrice Chereau’s (“Queen Margot,” “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train”) elegant production, which alternates, arbitrarily, between black and white and color, shot impeccably by Eric Gautier.

Like his senior, Ingmar Bergman, Chereau is an equally great theater and film director. In his furious “Intimacy” (2001), in English, he demonstrated that pitched, cinematic battles between the sexes are not exclusively a Swedish product.
I spent so much time during “Gabrielle” reading the copious, literary sub-titles, that I could hardly watch the faces and performances of its stars. (Huppert’s face may be now more withered than pretty, but her naked body is in truly splendid shape.) If and when the DVD becomes available, I will just watch it in French without titular distraction, although perhaps the titles, by then, will be transformed into more helpful yellow.

The picture’s rich, string-quartet score by Fabio Vacchi is marred only by the long-in-the-tooth croaking of a Russian art song, performed, no doubt authentically, by one Raina Kabaivanska. Ms. K. hides her crepe throat under a necklace of black jets, but it cannot conceal her ruined voice. She may, of course, have once been great. This may, in fact, be Chereau’s irony, that party guests in stately homes had to endure such indignities. But why are we obliged to suffer for, seemingly, the entire length of the lied?

M. Chereau is, as well, an opera director, and it is not nice to mock the once vocally celebrated. Of course, he may have thought that Madame K’s horrid sound lent poignance or humor to the scene. It does not.

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