The Passenger

Saw The Passenger. It opens with a war correspondent kicking the hell out of his car in the desert. He is futilely raging against his life in general, dissatisfied with a life of professional tourism, always moving, never belonging. He sees an opportunity when the only other occupant of a hotel (who closely resembles him) suddenly dies. The journalist assumes this man's identity and attempts to at last live the way he wants to live. However of course he has not escaped himself and soon the numbing, depressing meaningless feeling returns. He moves on and on, subconsciously seeking to outrun himself.

The film is an exploration of identity. The protagonist talks about how his identity is both unchangeable and blank. The identity he adopts, a gun-runner for African warlords, is very exciting but also one which prevents him from settling down. Of course we know both of his identities are, on paper at least, fairly rewarding and interesting: war correspondent and gun-runner? Now that's a life! But he seems bored and humiliated by the mundane details of missed appointments, hotels, and intractable interviewees who take control of the interview.

The protagonist has two very telling monologues in the film: the first is about how no matter how much he travels, he always translates the different experiences into the same set of sensations. I think this reveals that he has broadened himself to the point of dissolution. In an effort to soak up a whole world, he has lost track of who he is. The second monologue is about a blind man who has eye surgery to see again. Overcome by the mundane, everyday, drabness of the world, he retreats into his house and at last into suicide. This story mirrors our own hero's arc: he seeks his own space for introspection but cannot find anything remarkable there. This, combined with his isolation makes his depression almost inevitable. Then again, we may argue, he never really had his own space.

The movie is vague about whether he had a comfortable life before the fake death. I feel that the protagonist was really looking for something which didn't exist and which perhaps had yet to be created, slowly. His world-weariness was at odds with his genuine love of the world. He loved it, but I believe he felt like there was nothing behind his eyes, just voyeurism. A vacation from his life seemed to confirm this. A melancholy but not too depressing film. Chilly and intellectual but empathetic.