Passages
Directed by Ira Sachs
Running time: 1hr32 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Franz Rogowski in Passages
Bisexuality tends to get short shrift in the movies, even in the permissive realm of queer cinema: perhaps filmmakers deem it too complicated, too subtly nuanced, too subject to scepticism from either side of the spectrum to write about. It’s one reason a film like John Schlesinger’s sharp, wounding love triangle Sunday Bloody Sunday, now 52 years old, still feels so bracing, so modern: the plight of those who love across the binary rarely gets such frank exposure. Limberly sensual and emotionally savage, Ira Sachs’ exquisite Passages feels like the Sunday Bloody Sunday of its era — praise I wouldn’t dish out to just any old movie on the subject that comes down the pike — albeit with the older film’s buttoned-up Englishness replaced with a shimmying Parisian fluidity. Everyone here imagines themselves very cool, very chill, very mature, very modern; Sachs’ film tartly shows how real-world relationships can strip anyone of such airs.
At its centre are two lovers whom most would describe, without a second thought, as a gay couple. German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and British print artist Martin (Ben Whishaw) have been together for years, married for many of those, and share a chic apartment in Paris — neutral ground for two personalities that still aren’t, after all this time, obviously compatible. Tomas is a self-involved, overtly hedonistic sensualist, while Martin is more fretful and withdrawn; hot sex keeps them together, but there’s clearly an open window in this marriage. Climbing through it, to everyone’s surprise, is young schoolteacher Agathe, who begins an affair with Tomas and swiftly, unexpectedly falls pregnant. The three resolve to see through the situation like adults, but what’s the template for adult behaviour here? Aren’t they just children? Would Martin be more or less hurt if a man had come between them? And when Martin sleeps with another man, is Tomas’s jealousy any different from his?
Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias deftly tangle these questions through a short, spiny story that remains alive to reckless sensual pleasure even as its abrasive verbal warfare draws blood. (In the US, the film’s candid but gorgeously realistic sex scenes — no soft-lit carnal choreography here, lots of sweat and in-the-way limbs and undignified grunting — earned the film a rare NC-17 rating, proving there’s still nothing so shocking to a censor as two ordinary people enjoying themselves.) Sachs has already shown a keen eye and ear for the ebb and flow of gay coupledom in his films Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange; observing a couple where only one partner might agree with that categorisation, Passages ponders both the politics and everyday practicalities of who we love and how.
It’s both lacerating and painstakingly empathetic to each character; the same goes for its trio of extraordinary actors, dancing in and out of other’s space and gaze with feline precision. Exarchopoulos makes Agathe vulnerable but no fall girl in this scenario; Whishaw, compressing rage into a tight, strangled box, has never been better; Rogowski, among the most reliably fascinating actors on screen today, is a pathological narcissist whose terrible magnetic field nonetheless extends to the audience. We care for everyone in Passages; we can imagine ourselves agonisingly in love with any one of them. Or two, for that matter.
PASSAGES (2023) Written by Mauricio Zacharias, Ira Sachs | Shot by Josée Deshaies | Edited by Sophie Reine
In cinemas now