Birthday of The Passenger, or Anniversary of Professione: reporter

 On February 28, 1975, the premiere of Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Professione: reporter (The Passenger)" took place in Turin, Italy.

It was originally supposed that the film would be called "The Passenger". But then the authors decided that the film with the same name already was, and quite good (The Polish film of 1963 “Pasazerka (Passenger)" was meant. There is no female gender for the word “passenger” in English), and therefore the film in the European film market came out under the title "Profession: Reporter." In English-speaking countries, it was shown under the name "The Passenger".

Shortly after the premiere, in May 1975, the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival. But the jury of the film festival, chaired by Jeanne Moreau, awarded the main prize to the Algerian film "Chronicle of the Years of Fire". To some extent, “consolation” for Michelangelo Antonioni and his film can be considered that the company of “losers” for him was Martin Scorsese with the film “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore”, Sergey Bondarchuk with the film “They Fought for Their Country” and some others . 

By the way, the Soviet Union in the jury was represented by Yulia Ippolitovna Solntseva, wife and associate of Alexander Dovzhenko, the first woman director in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, awarded the First Prize for directing. I dare to suggest that during the vote, Yulia Solntseva cast her vote for the Algerian picture: its name very much resembled the name of the Solntseva film, for which he received his award - "The Story of the Flaming Years".

But back to the Antonioni movie. The following year, 1976, the film "Profession: Reporter" was awarded the Danish Bodil Prize as the best European film.

But before that, in the summer of 1975, the film "Profession: Reporter" participated in the Moscow International Film Festival, but only as part of an out-of-competition screening, thanks to which it was released to the screens of Soviet cinemas. And this fact is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, the film "Profession: Reporter" was the only one of the films of the so-called English-speaking trilogy Antonioni, which became available to the Soviet mass cinema audience. (Soviet movie-goers had to wait 15-20 years to get acquainted with the other two films of the trilogy - “Blowup” and “Zabriskie Point.”) And secondly, the sagacity of Soviet film distributors was surprisingly manifested, since several years after the film was released for various legal reasons the ownership of the film passed to Jack Nicholson, and for nearly twenty years he banned its screening in cinemas in Europe and America. Well, the significance of all sorts of "copyrights" in the USSR was well known to everyone.

Strangely enough, this many-year break in showing the film on the screens played a positive role in terms of its evaluation by film critics. If immediately after the release of the film on the screens, the reaction of film critics was not that negative, but rather indifferent, then after 30 years, when it was re-released, already on DVD, the reviews of critics were mostly enthusiastic. This was very clearly formulated by Roger Ebert, who wrote in 2005 in the amendment to the 1975 review: "I did not admire the film in 1975. In a negative review, I observed that Antonioni had changed its title from "The Reporter" to "The Passenger," apparently deciding it was about the Girl, not Locke. ... I admire the movie more 30 years later. I am more in sympathy with it."

 

As for the audience rating, almost 60% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film ratings from 8 to 10.

Based on the foregoing, the rating of the film "Profession: Reporter" according to FilmGourmand version is 7.947, and this allows it to occupy 807th Rank in the Golden Thousand.