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The dry, mellow comedy of a man's vanishing wish has him lost in the desert like Bugs Bunny after a wrong turn at Albuquerque, barely acknowledged by the camel rider passing by his stranded jeep. A documentarian in the Sahara, the professional seeker fatigued of "the same of old codes," Jack Nicholson's rare vulnerability in the sandy void. "Unusually poetic for a businessman," the fellow globetrotter (Charles Mulvehill) makes for a handy new identity when his corpse is found in a hotel room. "I used to be somebody else, but I traded him in." London, Munich, proper pit stops in a pellucid deceleration of espionage tropes, then Barcelona for a brush with the architecture student (Maria Schneider) on Gaudí's rooftops. Would-be widow (Jenny Runacre) and TV producer (Ian Hendry) participate in the slow-motion chase, "people disappear every day." "Every time they leave the room." Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece is a recapitulation of theme and a refinement of form, a tranquil quest in a world in upheaval, a most seductive drift toward oblivion. Resurrection means the slack reporter's discovery of commitment, he follows the schedule in the dead man's diary only to realize he's now a gunrunner. (Nothing lays bare radical chic like the African witch doctor turning the camera on his British inquirer, "now we can have an interview.") The elusive allure of flight, of leaning out of a cable car over an undulating harbor, of a smile from the back of a speeding convertible, of the twin trances of escape and imprisonment. The fake mustache glued to the globular lamp and the red flower smeared against a white wall, "all the shapes we make." Death for the somnambulist is an appointment kept, Antonioni's greatest passage proceeds from Hitchcock's lethal reverse track in Frenzy for a sublime culmination of time and space, analysis and sensation, the mundane and the momentous in a dusty Andalusian posada. "What's on the other side of that window?" Soon Wenders aims to assume the mantle with The American Friend. Cinematography by Luciano Tovoli. With Steven Berkoff, Ambroise Bia, James Campbell, and José María Caffarel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |