When the sun comes out in Michelangelo Antonioni’s world, where it is often past nightfall and raining, it shines pitilessly and in the sickliest colors: smog brown upon L.A., the faintest fluorescent green above a polluted Ravenna mining town, a London summer’s dank idea of grey, or at sea, a tornado rushing by, B&W equivalents to jaundice. At least Antonioni’s men and women, habitually breaking off affairs then starting something about which now they’re not too sure, can find some comfort in this expressionist kind of weather. Storms correspond to their state of mind. Whereas the rare clear day exposes their vanities to mock them—like the humiliatingly cloudless afternoon in L’eclisse (1962) when a stock trader (Alain Delon) watches a crane retrieve his totaled Alfa Romeo from the river inlet where the drunk who stole it—his cadaver is still behind the wheel—deposited it the evening before. That’s why the relentless sun beating down onto The Passenger (1975) feels so invasive. There is no longer anywhere left to hide, this light implies.

To escape is a compulsion for Antonioni’s characters, and just as The Passenger’s restless celebrity journalist (Jack Nicholson) dodges his wife and friends after thieving someone else’s identity, so had this long unavailable classic, until its brief thirtieth anniversary rerelease last October, eluded me ever since I’d noticed an old poster for it hanging in a Beverly Blvd. theater as a teenager. In profile, Maria Schneider—an incredible actress, in the literal sense—faces Nicholson, who was by then (this was the late 1980s) nearing The Two Jakes-Man Trouble-Wolf bend in his career. The Jack in the poster though has been captured in his iconic prime, wearing shades and a gonzo white cap unmistakably reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson.