Ok so I watched this movie basically blind(knew nothing about the plot) and it starts with our protag in what appears to be N.Africa somewhere doing er something? And then he is apparently searching for someone or something,sees a caravan in the desert and turns back and goes to the hotel he is staying at where he finds a dead guy in the room next door who he closely resembles so he steals his identity and then goes back to the dead guys area of residence in London.
A flashback early on establishes this was all apparently planned by the protag, he claims to be a reporter to the dead guy in a conversation they had where he pumped him for info while he was still alive obviously.
Is that all the info we get? I looked up the plot synopsis and it offers no further info. Did I miss something in the movie?
Is he really a reporter like he claimed to be to the dead man? Did he kill the dead man? Why would a 30-40 year old guy suddenly drop dead just a day or two after being targetted by a identity theif?
I assumed at first the protag was trying to leave the country, but could not so decided to use the chance presented by the dead guy.
I have not seen The Passenger and I can answer absolutely zero of your questions.
I will, however, ask you a question: How you ever watched any other films by Michelangelo Antonioni?
The Passenger is a film that people often come across when they take an interest in filling in little gaps in their familiarity with film history- either when they’re going down their 70s cinema checklist or when they’re going down their Nicholson checklist. People who happen upon the film in this way are inevitably bewildered.
We looked at Antonioni in a film class I took in college. I quite enjoyed his films for style, but damned if I could give you a plot synopsis of any of them- well, I could kinda give you a run down of the plot to Blow Up but the plot is basically beside the point. All of his films have people wandering around seeming lost and not doing very much.
Again, I have not seen The Passenger but my guess is that if you watch it with an understanding of Antonioni’s works (or a contented lack of understanding) it probably fits right in with expectations. If you watch it with no knowledge of Antonioni’s works you come away from it with . . . with . . . well, with the feeling that someone has after having seen their first Antonioni film.
Lets see. There was a photographer and a woman and someone got killed and something…
I don’t think anyone ever called anyone else by a name in that movie. The IMDB does list a few characters with names (some are The Blonde, The Brunette, the mime) but it was interesting.
Are you sure it wasn’t a coincidence. You said the protagonist “claims to be” a reporter. Are you sure he’s not one? And, being a reporter, a naturally curious person who would ask the guy a lot of questions without intending to “pump him for info” for identity theft?
He claims to be a reporter to the dead man, I never saw any confirmation of this. He audio taped the conversation with the dead man, even though it was just socializing over drinks NOT a journalist interview and he never asks the dead man if he can tape the convo so it seems he did it in secret. After he finds the guy dead and he is going through his documents and altering his passport he listens to the tape and memorizes the details so it seems like he planned it in advance, why else tape random chats over drinks?
I guess he did not plan to take the guys identity, and did not kill the guy according to wikipedia. But what a coincidence!
I saw the movie once a** long** time ago, but as I recall, the dude whose identity Nicholson assumes died of natural causes (a heart attack, even though you could clearly see his pulse throbbing in close-ups). Jack simply wanders into his hotel room and finds the corpse on the bed. I don’t remember if he had planned to steal the other guy’s identity, but I have the impression it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing (his passport was laying out on the dresser or something).
I remember seeing the previews in an cinema in Cambridge, England. I thought, “Wow, this is gonna be a cool movie, all about arms smuggling and African revolutions, and a guy using false passports while on the lam, etc., etc.” It turned out he just wanted to leave his old life behind him and have a wild fling with a hot babe (at least that was what I got out of it). After two hours, the lights went up and I sat there asking “That’s it? That’s the flick? Nothing happened!” I hadn’t been that disappointed since I paid to see Emmanuele (and my reaction was exactly the same).
Blow-Up, on the other hand, I found kind of interesting. It was slow-paced but not really tedious, and I actually was interested in what was going to happen next.
I JUST remembered that there was a small bit of throw away dialogue where the dead guy tells Nicholson he is not supposed to drink due to his weak heart, and then requests another drink,
Yea so I guess that is meant to explain the corpse the next day.
A down-on-his-luck American wanders from casino to casino, walking in and playing roulette, always betting on black. His winnings actually start to pile up until he has quite a pile of money. But he never spends any of it, instead just wandering around the city, getting in fights, and occasionally popping back into a casino to play. At the end of the film, he is arrested for tax evasion.
A flashback early on establishes this was all apparently planned by the protag, he claims to be a reporter to the dead guy in a conversation they had where he pumped him for info while he was still alive obviously.