Word: avventura
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...could be objected that this failure to come up with a realistic denouement is a fault, but it is one that the film shares with works like L'Avventura and Blow-Up, whose director, Michelangelo Antonioni, has obviously had an influence on Peter Weir. As in the master's work, the criminal, if there is one, is society. It does not matter to Weir whether there was a sexual criminal lurking up there among the rocks, awaiting these young women who are easy prey, or if their own erotic repression led to some self-destructive hysterical...
MANY NASTY THINGS have been written about Michelangelo Antonioni since his L'Avventura grabbed a legion of intellectuals and turned them into cultists in the early '60s--the backlash that follows movie cults is inevitably louder, bitchier and more memorable than the initial shockwave that turns a movie into a classic. For years, these two warning camps have made a lot of noise about Antonioni knowing that moviegoers themselves seldom rely on their own judgment but rather trust the deductions of those who are in a position to release periodic edicts...
Here, as in L'Avventura and La Notte, Antonioni's unsettled protagonist becomes increasingly the victim of a malaise that has no clear source. A television journalist named Locke (Jack Nicholson) is on assignment in a remote corner of the North African desert, trying to run to ground a story on some guerrilla fighters. The barren, blasted landscapes, the unknown language and ways of the few people Locke meets, are all transformed by Antonioni into coded messages of fate...
This is not necessarily a flaw. L'Avventura seemed initially to be about the search for a woman lost on an island. Then Antonioni -deliberately and to much controversy-abandoned this theme in favor of another, deeper one, a portrait of a whole inert society. In The Passenger, he lets go of the thriller elements midway and starts to concentrate on the growing relationship between Locke and a young tourist (Maria Schneider). But the change of focus does not deepen the picture as it did in L'Avventura. Instead, it diverts it while saying nothing new about Locke...
Porn people, those guiltless joy-seekers, may inspirt our envy and ignite our lascivious fantasies, wheras Ferreri's party-makers have only our pity, and our disgust. In porn, and in "advanced" movies of the sixties such as "La Dolce Vita," say, or "L'Avventura," decadence and dissipation are chic, inviting; the houseparty in "The Grande Bouffe" is entirely without glamour. You'll remember in "La Dolce Vita" the character of Paola the Innocent who represents the possibility of a higher and finer life than the one Marcello slips into. Here, Marcello has no options--he's sunk, irretrievably...