by Andrea Grunert

There are films one cannot forget. One that has continued to haunt me since I first saw it is François Rotger’s The Passenger (France/Canada/Japan, 2005). Living in Germany, where it had no theatrical release, I discovered the film only three or four years ago while doing research on the Japanese actor-director Yūsuke Iseya, who plays the leading role.

Violence and alienation in modern society
The Passenger was Rotger’s directorial debut (1) and the film was shot in three languages – Japanese, English and French – with the action set in Japan and Canada. Kohji (Iseya) is sent to Canada by the yakuza Naoki Sando (Yōsuke Natsuki), his mission being to kill Tanner (François Trottier), Sando’s Canadian business partner. Sando has stolen the yakuza’s gang’s takings from dog races, has put the blame on Tanner, and therefore needs to silence him to cover up his misdeed. Three years earlier, Sando surprised Kohji in bed with his daughter Hiroko (Kumi Kaneko), and Kohji is eager to fulfil the task in order to regain the elderly man’s favour.
Yakuza – members of the organized crime syndicates in Japan – play an important part in the film, but it is concerned less with their criminal deeds than with alienation in modern society, exploring human feelings and dealing with topics such as violence and vulnerability. However, The Passenger is not a psychological study either, instead making powerful use of mise en scène and editing devices to depict strong emotions and create disturbing moments.
The film’s parallel structure, sequences in Canada alternating with others in Japan, indicates just how closely the human destinies are intermingled despite the geographical distance. The relationship between Kohji and Hiroko is revealed through flashbacks giving glimpses of memories the two young people have of their lovemaking and shared moments of tenderness. Hiroko’s longing for her lover is expressed when her voice from the off accompanies shots of Kohji in the corridor of his hotel in Montreal. For Kohji, her voice is the acoustic materialization of a phone call that the young man now recalls visibly lost in thought. This dissociation of image and sound, which is also one of space and time, is a reminder of the geographical distance but also of the strong bond between the two lovers.
Disconnecting image and sound is used in The Passenger as a means to create fragmentation. Flashbacks and cross-cutting are also used to disrupt linearity, while abrupt cuts result in mere allusions. The viewer cannot always immediately make a connection between the shots and the action. In one of these shots, Tanner’s ex-wife Viv (Gabrielle Lazure), is sitting at a desk and framed in a side view. It is not until later in the film that the significance of this very brief image is revealed, and this is done in a longer sequence in which Viv is filmed in the same position and from the same angle. This is just one example of the many shots or short sequences which, at first glance, do not seem to be plot-related and therefore interrupt the narrative flow. However, by contributing to the film’s fragmented and allusive style, they imbue The Passenger with unsettling moments.
Although shot in three languages, The Passenger is a film with astonishingly little dialogue. Except for Hiroko’s long monologue at the end, the characters are anything but talkative. Kohji in particular is practically silent, contributing very little to the film’s dialogue. One explanation could be the fact that he has only a basic knowledge of English and none at all of French, but there is more to his uncommunicative behaviour than a lack of ability to express himself in a foreign language.
The relative silence that he and other characters maintain points to lack of communication as one of the film’s central tropes. In Kohji’s case, silence is accompanied by defiant body posture, expressing resistance and mistrust. Hiroko’s voice – the phone call in which she tells him that her father will forgive him if he kills Tanner – offers him a glimmer of hope. Not unlike Kohji, Hiroko, who is a student at high school, lives in a world of her own, refusing to tell her father about her relationship with Kohji and maintaining a distance between herself and her classmates. Instead of using words, many of the characters – for example Akira (Ryō Kase), the young nephew of a yakuza boss – resort to violence. In the first sequence in which he appears, Akira is shown battering a man frantically with a plastic bag containing a stone. This beating is filmed in a general shot with the characters – Akira, his victim and Akira’s three henchmen – tiny figures in the background. However, this distant framing does not diminish the extreme brutality of the killing. Akira is depicted as an aggressive adolescent who visibly enjoys violence. Violence is his way of compensating for a lack of maturity – his youthful smile giving him an air of innocence when he drives Hiroko home. Buoyed up by her friendly attitude, he suddenly changes his behaviour, starting to race around in circles on an empty site in an industrial estate. However, both seem to enjoy the wild ride, revealing their youthful desire for freedom.
Despite several scenes of great brutality, violence is predominantly latent, emanating from the body language of the characters and also from the hostile environment depicted in both Japan and Canada, and reinforced by a feeling of constant tension created by cinematic means. Abrupt movements within the image and frequent shifts from static shots to rapid movement create moments of shock, for example when Kohji, earning money as a male prostitute, is shown with a client in the hotel room in Canada, both undressing slowly. A hard cut emphasizes the movement with which the young Japanese is suddenly and brutally pinned against the wall, where his client takes him from behind.
In a previous sequence, still set in Japan, several young men with Kohji among them are waiting on a beach promenade when a car stops to pick up Kohji, suggesting that he makes a living by selling his body. In a different sequence, Kohji and other homeless men are sleeping in the street. No explanation is offered for this life in misery except for the fact that he has fallen from favour with his mentor Sando. However, his situation hints at the problems facing many Japanese young men who were left with no career prospects after the end of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, an economic decline that continued into the early 2000s. It was especially young people like Kohji who were hit by the problems of unemployment and a general lack of orientation.

Hostile environments and human bodies
Kohji’s search for Tanner in a country unknown to him is also a quest for identity by a disoriented youth. However, alienation affects not only young people such as Kohji and Hiroko, with Viv also trapped in a world marked by solitude and despair, and the film’s dehumanized bleak urban and suburban environment is an indication of loneliness in the modern world. Kohji and other characters too walk and drive along empty streets, and several scenes take place on industrial sites devoid of any human presence, their ugliness intensifying the film’s gloomy atmosphere. The modern-looking residential area where Viv lives has stylish houses but looks similarly lifeless, with no sign of other inhabitants or of vegetation. The light grey colour of the buildings, all of them outwardly identical, is in keeping with the film’s strongly reduced colour palette, as is the greyness and cold blue of the snow-covered countryside. The barren wintry landscape in Canada is a hostile environment in which Kohji, a small human figure filmed in a general shot, fights his way through the snow. Numerous nocturnal scenes reinforce the feeling of oppression – the light reflected by the snow creating an eerie atmosphere.
Deepening the visual impression, Rotger depicts modern society as an inhospitable place, with the silence that dominates long stretches of the film intensifying its persistent tension. Music – mainly non-diegetic – is used sparingly. A haunting tune that accompanies the first sequence recurs later at several points as a fitting reinforcement of the film’s disturbing atmosphere.
Communication in the film is a physical matter involving the human body through violence and sexual intercourse. Kohji has sex with his girlfriend and with his client in the hotel. He also has sex with Viv, depicted as a lonely and frustrated divorcee living in a house as empty and sterile as the residential area in which it is located. The middle-aged Viv, afraid of getting older, is obsessed with her body, torturing it in the fitness studio and undergoing beauty surgery. Kohji seems to give her hope – in a conversation with her former husband, she says that she has a new lover. However, for Viv and also for Tanner, love is an illusion. His new girlfriend is 23 years old, and after making love to him, she takes all the money from his wallet and leaves. Kohji’s interest in Viv is mainly a ruse to help him find Tanner. However, he does give her a moment of happiness brief though it may be.

No escape from the self
Communication, often non-verbal, is also conveyed by the eyes, for example when Kohji sizes up Viv or the tender expression on his face while caressing Hiroko. When Akira tries to kiss Hiroko, the young woman resists, and angered by her rejection, he pushes her violently, causing her to stumble and fall onto a table with a glass top, which shatters. Covered in blood and in great pain, she stares at Akira, her face expressing a mixture of feelings – confusion, fear, pride.
The film depicts not only moments of violence and aggression but also moments of tenderness. Kohji and Hiroko kiss in a field of pampas grass bathed in the warm yellowish colours of a summer day. In Japanese culture, pampas grass is related to death and this scene thus seems to forebode the tragic events to come. Alternating editing shows Akira shooting Hiroko dead while Kohji, unaware of the man’s innocence, strangles Tanner underwater in the latter’s private swimming pool. This cross cutting links violence and love, suggesting that when Kohji fulfils his murderous mission, he is at the same time losing the woman he loves. This close connection between love and death is also created via colours and lighting, the bluish water of the swimming pool contrasting sharply with the scene in the field of pampas grass in the bright sunlight. In both sequences, the characters are naked, and the underwater killing resembles an embrace between killer and victim, two lonely souls locked together in an underwater dance of death.
In both Japanese and Western culture, water is richly symbolic, signifying among other things purity, renewal and the flow of life. The idea of impermanence with which water is associated in Buddhist thinking permeates the whole film. A shot in one of the final sequences again shows Kohji and other male prostitutes waiting for clients on the deserted beach promenade under a leaden sky. A few moments later, another single shot shows the same location, now devoid of all human presence, as if pointing to the transient nature of existence, something that Hiroko also refers to in her long monologue, for which she is filmed in front of a black background, like a ghost talking from the realm of the dead.
The sequence with Kohji and Hiroko in the field of pampas grass creates an impression of innocence and vulnerability, and frequent shots of Kohji struggling in the cold of the Canadian winter also contribute to the image of a vulnerable and lonely young man, magnificently supported in these shots by Iseya’s strong performance. For Kohji and other characters in the film, the fragility of human existence is a symptom of their desire to be loved, a desire that remains unfulfilled for the lonely Viv as well as for the two young Japanese.
Kohji, lied to by Sando, is a pawn in a network of intrigues and betrayals. However, he is not depicted simply as a victim but also as a clever and resourceful person in a foreign country and with scarcely any knowledge of the language who manages to track down his prey. He is perfectly capable of adapting to new conditions and to surviving, defying the extreme cold and fighting his way – “fighting” being here the most appropriate term – through a hostile environment. He steals a car, breaks into the industrial premises that Tanner uses for his business, gains Viv’s confidence and steals a fax Tanner has sent her on which he finds the important information about Tanner’s whereabouts. Brutally beaten by Tanner’s henchmen and submitting to violent sex with his client, Kohji not only receives violence but also distributes it. He shoots at Tanner’s men and gives a vengeful hard kick at the bed of his sleeping client before leaving the hotel room. This is the rather childish reaction of a young man, someone who nevertheless acts like a professional criminal and cold-blooded killer. After he has murdered Tanner, Kohji is seen kneeling on a frozen lake and drinking from a hole he has dug in the ice. Filmed in a general shot, he is a tiny figure in the vast expanse of the snowy landscape – the final image of a lonely survivor.

Notes
(1) François Rotger, born in France, established himself as a fashion photographer and director of music videos. After making several short films, he wrote and directed The Passenger, which premiered in 2005 at the Locarno Film Festival. Story of Jen, his second feature film and for which he also wrote the soundtrack, was released in 2008.