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What Antonioni gives is a distinctive and disorienting way of seeing. The Passenger has some of the boldest and most supple imagery that Antonioni has achieved in years — more memorable than anything in Blow -Up or the unfortunate Zabriskie Point. Images are charged with mystery: Locke greets a camel rider all hidden in robes and wearing dark glasses. The man moves by him, staring but not answering. He seems to signal death in his every aspect.
The Passenger ends with a scene that seems destined for cinematic history.
Like other famous closing scenes — the frozen frame at the end of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, for instance, or the camera moving down the long line of waiting men in Max Ophuls' Lola Montez — this one is made with a flourish of virtuosity. The sequence is accomplished in a single stunning shot, which goes from Locke's hotel room slowly out into a town square and back again to the win dow of the hotel. The elements shift and change, but the moving camera gives them continuity. Without a single cut, the scene lasts seven minutes and brings together all the elements in Locke's world. It would be unfair to tell exactly what happens, but watching Antonioni make it happen is a rare sensual pleasure. The Passenger is not a great film, but its very ambition is a reminder of how smug and easy most movies are, and how little they dare.