The Passenger

Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger is a film that can be watched once a year for life. Starkly beautiful, reticent, and ambiguous, it is the perfect antitode to an age that is obvious, loud, and ugly. The denouement is an extended, magnificently choreographed scene with no cuts. "I never knew him," says the main character's wife, standing over his corpse. I like the idea that Borges (I think) had of writing a mystery story with a wrong ending but with a true solution not in the text that only a few readers would figure out. In a plodding, literal-minded culture, surely something like that would never find a publisher.