At once one of Michelangelo Antonioni's most mesmerizing and silliest movies, The Passenger glides forward on a cloud of anomie and movie-star charisma. Thirty years after its initial release, the film's diagnosis of soul-sick agnosticism seems both prescient and passé, its torpid pronouncements mere padding between the hypnotic glide of Luciano Tovoli's tracking shots.

As David Locke, a British-born, U.S.-educated journalist on assignment in an unnamed African country, Jack Nicholson starts the movie lost, and never finds his way. Abandoned by his guide in the middle of the desert, he spins his wheels uselessly, emerging to thwack his Jeep with a shovel and scream, "I don't care!"

Scrawny, feral and utterly lost, Nicholson's Locke is a creature of action, if only because he has no higher purpose than to stay in constant motion. "I've been to so many places in the past few years, it doesn't matter anymore," commiserates Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), the only other occupant of Locke's African hotel, who promptly drops dead and offers Locke an opportunity to take the longest trip of his life.

Swapping IDs with the dead man (the film's Italian title, Profession: Reporter, presumably refers to a passport datum), Locke assumes his identity, and more besides: Keeping the dead man's appointments, he discovers that his erstwhile neighbor dealt arms to the same rebels Locke was in Africa to cover. It could be the scent of story that drives Locke onward, but the fact that his contacts like to stage their meetings in churches hints at a larger crisis of faith. "You believe in our cause," says one grateful African, not knowing he's talking to some combination of an imposter and a ghost.

In Barcelona, Locke meets the similarly spectral Maria Schneider, whose character lacks substance enough to merit a name. (In the credits, she's merely "The Girl.") Beginning with the most awkward get-to-know-you conversation this side of The Manchurian Candidate, their relationship is more of a testament to the laws of international co-production than a meeting of the minds. Their best exchange has nothing to do with talk: As they drive down a tree-lined road somewhere between here and there, Schneider asks what Locke is running away from. He tells her to turn around and look, and she smiles as she sees the road peel away behind them.

Ending with a celebrated six-minute shot that zooms slowly through the window of Locke's hotel room, then swivels and returns to its source, The Passenger constantly folds back on itself: What we think is Locke's memory of his encounter with Robertson turns out to be a surreptitious tape recording, with the visuals supplied from the ether. But in questioning itself, The Passenger falls back on the same relativism for which it condemns Locke. Journalists aren't supposed to choose sides, but what's Antonioni's excuse?

(sam@citypaper.net)