"And I ride and I ride..."

I'm in agreement with Pauline Kael that, with the wondrous exception of L'Avventura, the rest of Michaelangelo Antonioni's oeuvre doesn't quite hold up. A montage -- like the one the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases played to a befuddled audience when he received the honorary Oscar in 1995 -- seems the best way of honoring him: Jeanne Moreau's night walk in La Notte, her senses alive to the excitement and terror of city life; Alain Delon's feline torpor in Eclisse; that waiting-for-a-Woody-Allen-parody tennis match between mimes in Blow-Up.

Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, I got a chance to rescreen The Passenger, his second and last American film. Yawning loudly upon watching the crappy videocassette edition that was extant in the early '90s, I was riveted this time by Antonioni's beautiful, unsettling juxtaposition of man and architecture, of man and landscape, whether it's David Locke (Jack Nicholson) sharing a smoke with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa, or standing before an Andalusian mountain, gradually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft (Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention). A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also -- if not just -- a swanky head trip. You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni's so genial a director that while you're arguing about the film's metaphysical import he's already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Kael's ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international icon for aging male lions which Last Tango in Paris positioned her as. As for Jack, with superstardom awaiting him (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was released a few months later), his commitment to the project never flags. He doesn't do much but walk, brood and frown puzzlingly at Schneider (no wonder we love Jack: he's human like the rest of us), but this is one of his more unheralded quiet performances: his character's self-contempt oozes from every pore.

Nicholson's commentary track, to which you can listen without cutting into your film time since there's so little dialogue, is a model of intelligence and concision (and stamina; Jack sounds like he's got strep throat). If L'Avventura intimidates you, as it should (two hour-plus rendering of the spiritual isolation of vapid rich people), The Passenger is an excellent condensation of the Antonioni style.