Passages Is an Unnerving, Electric Romantic Drama
The protagonist of Passages, an incisive new romantic drama from the director Ira Sachs, is a man obsessed with perfecting others’ movements, even as he struggles to control his own. The story opens on a Paris film set, where a director named Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) critiques an actor’s stiff entrance into a party scene. “This is just a transition moment, but we are turning it into a huge drama moment, because you’re not able to make some fucking simple steps down the staircase!” Tomas yells, arms motioning up and down the threshold his actor can’t seem to cross with sufficient finesse.
Passages is filled with similarly stressful snapshots of the tightly wound director, who is no less taxing in his personal life. His recklessness gives rise to the movie’s central tension, which kicks off at the wrap party for Tomas’s apparently exasperating film (also called Passages). After his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), leaves the party, Tomas revels in the attention lavished upon him by a young French woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The night progresses, and their bodies migrate from the dance floor to a bedroom. The next morning, Tomas bursts through the door of the apartment he shares with Martin, waiting all of two minutes to announce: “I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?” Weary of his husband’s destructive searches for postproduction catharsis, Martin withdraws from the conversation.
A different kind of film might have focused on this rupture between the two spouses, using the director’s infidelity to plumb their respective and shared emotional landscapes. Passages does broach this territory, but the film is more of a character study of Tomas than it is a portrait of his relationship with Martin or his affair with Agathe. It’s no tortured-artist hagiography, though: Agathe is originally enthralled by his artistry, but the quality of Tomas’s oeuvre ends up being nearly irrelevant to who he is, both in her estimation and in the film’s. Unrelenting and frank, Passages captures the creeping discontents of its Fassbinder-lite protagonist without losing sight of how his transgressions affect those around him. He may be magnetic, but Tomas is also unquestionably egotistical, brash, shortsighted, and mean. With a sparse visual sensibility and sharp dialogue, the film surveys the interpersonal damage wrought by Tomas’s carelessness, making poignant observations about power, desire, and the psychological contours of creative life.
Sachs, a veteran independent filmmaker who also directed the family sagas Frankie and Little Men, is particularly attuned to the cris-crossing complexities of relationships. (Passages was co-written by Sachs, who is American, and his frequent collaborator, the Brazilian screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias; additional dialogue is credited to the French screenwriter Arlette Langmann.) The characters in Passages circle one another constantly: Before Agathe and Tomas’s catalytic dance-floor encounter, it’s Martin who first approaches her at the bar, after watching her have a conversation with the man she came to the party with, whom she ends up rejecting. “Sorry to intrude,” Martin says in Anglophone-sounding French, when Agathe looks confused by his attentiveness. “I thought maybe you wanted to talk to someone.” As Agathe’s affair with Tomas unfolds, Martin never antagonizes her, and the film transcends familiar love-triangle clichés in part because the characters don’t blame one another for the wounds Tomas inflicts.
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Passages indulges in the pleasure and tyranny of all its main subjects—foremost Tomas, but also its more abstract concerns: the intertwined pursuits of art, love, sex, and belonging. Tomas’s affair with Agathe spurs Martin’s interest in a writer named Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), whose novel becomes a symbol of the chasm between the two husbands. When Agathe tells Tomas that she found the book and the author both “very original,” the comment briefly destabilizes their union too. Tomas is troubled that she admires another talented man; the fact that Amad lives in Agathe’s literary imagination is as disturbing as his physical relationship with Martin.
As Rogowski plays him, the fiercely needy Tomas vibrates with anxiety even as he projects a self-assured image. Throughout the film, he is seemingly incapable of stillness, ping-ponging across the city on his bicycle, flitting from one lover’s house to the other’s, popping up unannounced at either’s workplace. Passages contrasts his live-wire persona with the steadiness of his two lovers, whom Whishaw and Exarchopoulos play with quiet, masterly resolve. Tomas lays his insecurities at their feet, asking Martin to soothe the sting he feels from Agathe’s judgments, and vice versa.
The only time Tomas is at ease, it seems, is when he’s having sex. Refreshingly, Tomas, though prone to navel-gazing, doesn’t lament any perceived confusion about his sexuality or what labels he ought to use. (This is, perhaps, partly a function of the film’s multicultural Parisian setting and the attendant fluidity in language.) The closest he comes to a crisis of identity is more a crisis of cultural norms: After disastrously fumbling his first meeting with Agathe’s parents, Tomas runs back to Martin, admitting to his estranged husband that he misses being with men. The tearful confession doesn’t register as a comment on Tomas’s sexual preferences but rather an expression of how suffocated he feels by the social expectations placed on him as a man who appears to be in a heterosexual relationship.
Sachs excels at choreographing all manner of intimacies. Scenes such as that ill-fated meeting with Agathe’s parents reveal as much about his characters’ relationships as the film’s sex scenes, which have made it the latest in a long line of queer dramas to be given an NC-17 rating. (One of the others, the director Abdellatif Kechiche’s troubled 2013 romance, Blue Is the Warmest Color, also stars Exarchopoulos.) The sex in Passages is indeed stark—nearly wordless, hardly silent. But the beds in the film aren’t just loci of connection, illicit or otherwise. They’re also excavation sites, the minefields where characters unearth tensions between one another and within themselves. They’re reminders, above all, of how a relationship must change when one person refuses to.