The Brunswick, Bernard Street, WC1
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 The Passenger, disaffected TV documentarist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) swaps identities with a dead man in North Africa, only to find that his new persona is that of a dodgy arms dealer.
Arriving in London to put together the pieces of his new identity, Locke is seen in the then-new Brunswick Centre, Bloomsbury, where he first claps eyes on Maria Schneider. A gift to Antonioni, with his great eye for austere, brutalist backdrops; there have been a few changes since the Seventies. The centre has been rebranded as simply The Brunswick, and well and truly Starbucked, its once-yawning space lined with shops and terrace cafes.
The centre contains arthouse cinema, the Renoir Cinema, outside which Catherine McCormack waits in Born Romantic.
The Passenger (aka Profession: Reporter) (1975, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)
Born Romantic (2000, dir: David Kane)
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