How utterly loathsome can a protagonist become before the audience turns on them completely, and by that token, what makes the spectacle of their horribleness so electrifying to watch on-screen? Passages, the new film from writer-director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange, Little Men), provocatively challenges the viewer to situate themself within the perspective of one of the most singularly unlikable lead characters that’s been put to screen in years. By doing so, it creates a tender and subtly exasperating drama about the intersection between the control and desire, which non-judgmentally utilizes its protagonist’s selfish behavior as a way to ask the audience what uncomfortable truths they see within themselves.
When we first meet sexually impulsive filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski, consistently fascinating), he’s subsumed in the final days of a stressful film shoot. On set, a fake bar, he exerts precise control over the world he’s carefully created, admonishing an actor for their inability to walk down the stairs in a naturalistic way and frustratedly telling off a pair of rattled extras. It’s a revealing opening sequence that sets the stage for the film that follows: Tomas’ film is also called Passages, and in many ways, Sachs’ own story is about the challenge, and ultimately failure, of a domineering artist to control his own relationships in the same way he controls his set. It would be irresponsible, and perhaps a fool’s errand to presuppose how much the film is informed by Sachs’ own life, but the framing device does tinge the project with a hint of autobiography.
In real life, Tomas is married to a mild-mannered man named Martin (Ben Whishaw, fairly far from Paddington territory), and their relationship is clearly hanging by a barren thread. At a nightclub, presumably after the film has wrapped, both men meet Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an alluringly new woman whom Tomas soon, and rather giddily, sleeps with. One gets the sense, though it’s never specified, that this is not the first time that Tomas has guiltlessly cheated on his spouse (he eagerly announces his escapade to an exhausted Martin in the morning), but the experience appears to awaken him to new and unique possibilities. He soon leaves his husband, moving in with Agathe, only to grow restless and attempt to pull them both into a reluctant romantic triangle. This tenuous situation soon begins to implode, however, in no small part due to the shockingly egotistical Tomas’ inability to reckon his own shifting desires with anything resembling consistent affection for those he professes to love.
Despite the inherent drama of its juicy, erotically charged premise, Passages is fairly laid-back. Stylistically, Sachs’ framing is naturalistic and uncluttered, an approach that extends to the film’s frank and occasionally lengthy sex scenes, which have unfortunately garnered it an NC-17 rating from the MPA (an absurd and limiting decision that Sachs has rightly called “a form of cultural censorship.” U.S. distributor Mubi has elected to release the film unrated in protest). Despite having an American director, Passages feels decidedly European in tone and execution. The screenplay, co-written by Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias and Arlette Langmann, never passes judgement on Tomas’ behavior, allowing its gloriously messy drama of affairs and romantic clashes to play out unfettered by a musical score or even suggestive editing. The approach can be bare bones, but never to the story’s detriment.
Apart from the script, much of the film’s success can be attributed to a trio of strong performances, particularly Rogowski. Costumed in a seemingly endless array of flamboyant fishnet tops, the talented German actor plays Tomas with an intensely dramatic flair that’s never less than magnetic. It’s easy, at least initially, to see why Agathe and Martin might be drawn to him. By the film’s conclusion, an understated nod to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, you get the sense that Tomas is still in many ways a little boy, unable to cope with a world that doesn’t operate at his whim. It ultimately makes him more pathetic than detestable. Another standout is Whishaw, in a more understated role that utilizes his puppy dog features to convey deeply repressed emotional fatigue. Combined with last year’s Women Talking, the actor is starting to build up an impressive repertoire of characters you simply want to hug. As Agathe, Exarchopoulos delivers some of the film’s most potent assertions. At one point, after Tomas tells her he loves her, she responds “I bet you say that a lot.” “I say it when I mean it,” he retorts. She sniffs. “You say it when it works for you.”
If occasionally too narratively oblique, Passages is a rich viewing experience because it trusts the viewer to come to their own conclusions without forcing any moralistic perspective onto the characters or their uncertain futures beyond the story’s conclusion. In this way, Sachs’ approach is deeply humanistic. As Tomas learns, the world isn’t like one of his movies, and dramatic developments can occur with little to no warning, much less any ability to control their outcomes. His life is one spent in the pursuit of being unknowable, but that can only result in being alone. In the end, as an angered Tomas furiously bikes his way through Paris, he seems to be going everywhere and nowhere at once, a hamster caught in a wheel so propped up by its own delusions that he can only go in circles again, and again, and again.
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