The first shot of Rebecca Hall’s Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, slowly comes into focus to reveal a feet-level shot of a New York City street as two white women bustle about shopping for presents for their children and fixate on some racist caricature dolls. When one of them drops the Sambo toy, Irene (Tessa Thompson) helpfully hands it back, her face pointedly obscured by a translucent sun hat. As the camera follows Irene on her own day of errands, we see her constantly checking her surroundings as she shops in boutiques, gets in cabs and goes to fancy tea houses, navigating a white world but unable to take a moment’s comfort in passing.
It is at one of those tea parlors that her paranoia is validated by the intent stare of a woman, who finally comes over and introduces herself as an old classmate, Clare (Ruth Negga). Where Irene spends her daylight hours constantly glancing over her shoulders in fear of being caught, Clare, more light-skinned, has decided that the best defense is a good offense. She speaks loudly and moves with exaggerated elegance, a strategy based on the notion that the most noticeable people are the most easily ignored, as no one would suspect such a dazzling, attention-grabbing person of hiding something. The contrast between the women’s methods of accessing the privileges of white society immediately sparks something deeper than mere pleasantries between the two, and the rest of the film details how their rekindled friendship both tackles and inflames the tensions of their everyday lives.
Quickly, however, the characters become entirely defined by the ways in which they act as foils for each other. Irene, who came from a wealthy family, speaks with a posh, almost British accent, while the poor Clare occasionally betrays a sharper and less polished tongue despite her outward poise. Irene stayed in their childhood Harlem environs and married a dark-skinned doctor, Brian (André Holland), while Clare has married a white man, John (Alexander Skarsgård), who is so virulently racist (if clueless) that he has taken to affectionately calling his wife a racial slur as a joke for how she sometimes strikes him as darker than he expects. The comparisons run so deep that they extend to minor details, such as Clare typically avoiding Black people at all costs, even barring her husband from hiring maids lest she get discovered, while Irene has a servant that implicates her in the same racial-economic system that ensnares her. The accumulation of these comparisons robs the characters of their sense of reality, defining them as symbols first and then belatedly seeking to explore their actual flesh-and-blood humanity.
When the film does ease off its reductive contrasts, it occasionally finds rich avenues to explore with the characters. As Clare and Irene reconnect, the former also reconnects with the Black community she long ago shunned for her own self-preservation. Negga subtly modulates her performance to let Clare’s practiced behaviors slowly crack and reveal a self that she suppressed years ago. While Clare’s early scenes are filled with a practiced and forced conviviality, slowly she begins to display real joy and vitality in spaces where she no longer hides. This also causes her to latch onto Irene and Brian in ways that move beyond mere friendship and sometimes betray a truly bold sexual frisson. Irene herself also has an ambiguous relationship with an old, white liberal, Hugh (Bill Camp), whose frank, if charmingly sassy conversations with her about race betray his blinkered privilege while also offering a more lighthearted, unguarded forum for Irene to air her quiet thoughts without feeling weighed down by them.
Hall’s decisions to make the film in black-and-white and in Academy ratio have obvious importance: monochrome erases the gradations of color of human skin, reducing everything to an equalized spectrum of grays, while the narrow aspect ratio adds to the sense of suffocation in a society that has legally and socially codified discrimination and fear. But the film never truly taps into that pressure, staging numerous variations on a theme where the characters lament the unfairness of their social situations but never squeezing them to convey that grueling, lifelong torment. The film is dramatically inert for most of its runtime, adopting an emotionally flat tone that treats its racial subtext more as an intellectual curio than a roiling, still-present source of psychological dislocation. Both Thompson and Negga find ways to develop and shade their characters, illustrating how their interactions reshape them, but Passing never coheres around their work, idling in place until an abrupt conclusion whose belated reckoning with pent-up racial rage feels cheap rather than inevitable.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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