Cinema

Death without a sting

Kenneth Robinson

The Passenger Director: Antonioni Stars: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre 'A' Ritz (120 mins).

Mice Doesn't Live Here Any More Director: Martin Scorsese Stars: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter 'AA' Curzon (100 mins).

Antonioni's new film is fantastically beautiful and intelligent. It also has the daftest and most banal ending I have seen in the cinema for some time. The chief character, a London television reporter played by Jack Nicholson, is killed in his bedroom in a Spanish hotel. "Do YOU recognise him?" asks a policeman. "I do," says his mistress. "I never knew him," says his wife.

This is the only line of portentous dialogue in the film. The man's death seems merely an easy way of dodging the effort of rounding off a good story. Unless, of course, you see the ending of a Message. Most reviewers insist on finding philosophical overtones in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. And with such a name he can hardly be surprised. But I can never accept that a work is written on two levels unless I have the author's word for it. Even then I prefer the evidence of what I see to an interpretation I am expected to see.

So to get back to the story of The Passenger. It never occurred to me that, as some people have assured me, this is a tale of the inevitable winding-down and stopping of an unsuccessful life. I do agree with some critics that in Antonioni's films death hardly seems to matter. But this, I believe, is not because the director intends death to seem unimportant. It is simply that neither the characters nor the plots of his stories are as impressive as the way the stories are told.

This one opens, rather turgidly, in an African desert town. It is not clear why an Englishman, David Locke, is driving a jeep in the desert. Nor is it clear why, in the following two scenes, he appears to be not only dying of exposure but also following a native to a military town. He is soon back in his hotel, pushing on with the plot by discovering that a fellow-Englishman has died in bed from a heart attack. The awful boredom he feels at being what he is and where he is gets put over with depressing realism by Antonioni who is, of course, a master at expressing boredom. In an atmosphere of buzzing flies and whirring ceiling= fans we share the ennui that makes the reporter decide to change identities with the dead man.

Because of the similarity of the men's passport photographs Locke is able to do a quick forgery job. From this moment the film is transformed into a lively look at movement, colour and architectural excitement. Locke is now guided in what he does by the dead man's diary. And because he decides to keep the dead man's appointments, without first discovering what his line of business was, he finds himself both rewarded for gunrunning and pursued by his employers' enemies.

Locke's attitude throughout is like that of Holly in The Third Man. (Some of the dialogue also reminds me of that film, and so does the zither-like guitar-music at the end.) He is, quite clearly, an ineffectual character. Flashbacks show his early television interviews with African leaders. In one he is rebuked by his subject for putting sincerity before honesty — a distinction that really keen followers of media-men will understand. After another interview his wife tells him that although he is involved in reality he has "no real dialogue". That, he explains, is because he is "keeping to the rules".

This, as I said, is in flashback scenes. Back in the present time Locke's wife, who lives in Antonioni's fantasy-montage of Pimlico, Bloomsbury, Notting Hill and Battersea, becomes suspicious about the circumstances of his reported death. As she watches playbacks of his television interviews, protesting that he is no more worthy of a posthumous biographical programme than any other journalist, she begins to wonder if she had always been wrong about him.

And so, as Locke follows his new life — against the carefully-selected backgrounds of, for instance, a Bavarian church interior, the Barcelona bird-market arid grotesque buildings by Gaudi — his wife (Jenny Runacre) finds enough evidence to reach his hotel in Spain. By then he has acquired mistress (Maria Schneider) and a snazy open car. This gives the director the opportunity of showing Miss Schneider's pretty face against trees flying past overhead. It also gives Locke the chance of losing pursuers with ease and elegance.

Elegance is what the film is about. At the beginning Locke tells a story about a blind man who was driven to suicide when he regained his sight. "He noticed ugliness everywhere." The thing about Antonioni is that he refuses to show us any ugliness at all. Even in a bleak new Spanish suburb he chooses his camera-angles to give an impressive appearance to the lines of streets and buildings.

Sometimes he gets his effects with colour, as when a pile of red boxes enlivens a sleazy wayside bar. And at one moment, in a car chase, he takes a quick look at a lurching vehicle from behind an exceptionally good piece of sculpture on an otherwise dreary street corner.

Then there is the very long final sequence. We are in Locke's hotel bedroom as he waits for an unknown visitor. As we wait the director makes us look at small incidents outside the window and to listen to the everyday noises of the town. While we watch, Locke is beingosilently killed, as we discover later. All this time his mistress has been walking and talking in the square outside the window. We are left with the thought that maybe she conspired to kill him. I find this just as stupid as the remainder of the ending. When a story-teller knows so much, it seems terribly contrived that he should opt out at the last moment.

:Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More is an unfashionably straightforward story. The reason Alice doesn't live where she did is that her husband gets killed after about ten minutes of film. She promptly takes her twelve-year-old son with her on a working trip towards Monterey, where he had been happy as a child. A lot of tears are shared with neighbours as she leaves, but after a series of adventures, first as a singer and then as a waitress, she finds true love. This, she realises, is something she lacked with her husband, who was merely "a great kisser".

Alice has an amusing and amused relationship with her son, played by Alfred Lutter. Here, for once, is a child who is not cute. He would, in fact, steal the picture from Ellen Burstyn if it had not already been stolen by the café proprietor and. the waitresses where she works and falls in love.

In the days before women were liberated this would have been called a woman's film. It has a great deal of warmth and sentimentality. And if you like a little obscenity with your tears you should know that the sort Alice entertains the audience with is lavatorial rather than physical.