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PASSAGES WHISHAW ROGOWSKI.png

Review: The Heat Generated In Ira Sachs' 'Passages' Will Scorch Your Soul

By Jason Adams | Film | August 4, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | August 4, 2023 |


PASSAGES WHISHAW ROGOWSKI.png

When we first meet Tomas (Franz Rogowski) he’s trying to direct the final scene of his movie. Everybody’s ready for the wrap party, but the frustration on Tomas is thick, and before you know he’s screaming at his lead actor that he has no idea how to walk like a believable human being down a staircase. It’s the sort of nasty spectacle we’ve become accustomed to seeing get passed around on social media as a means of creative-type canceling—in real life there’s the “David O. Russell berates Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees” example, while Cate Blanchett recently gave fictional representation to it with her needlessly cruel takedown of a student in TÁR.

But here in Ira Sachs’ masterfully callous romantic quandary of a film called Passages (which just premiered at Sundance) it’s merely prologue—barely remarked upon, and the next time we see everybody from the movie-within-the-movie they’re dancing the night away, happy little French clams. Still, that distasteful funk attaches itself to Tomas right off the bat, and so everything that comes after seems merely confirmation of our initial impression—what a heel this man is, bullshit piled high as the heavens.

It’s an interesting maneuver to make, for a film that—if you know anything about Sachs’ personal life—feels the most ripped-from-the-headlines autobiographically to date. In real life, Sachs — who is married to a man — lives next door to the mother of his twin children (the great documentarian Kirsten Johnson). And they all co-parent together in a happy little indie-successful New York liberal bubble that gets lots of play in New York liberal bubble circles. (Speaking from my own such bubble, I can attest.) While we’re only privy to the press idealization of their real-life arrangement, with Passages Sachs seems to have decided to tell the dark version of this tale. One where filmmaker narcissism run rampant obliterates all in its path.

Thank goodness Sachs snatched up such fine actors for the project then, which would’ve proved a rougher assignment in lesser hands. Rogowski alone has thrust himself onto the scene over the past few years as one of the great actors of his generation—from Michael Haneke’s Happy End to Christian Petzold’s Transit to (greatest of all) his spectacularly insulated turn as an imprisoned gay man in last year’s Great Freedom, he’s one of the most fascinating presences haunting movie-screens today. And he brings all of that power raining down in harsh waves across Passages, which calls on him to be a brutal shit that we can nevertheless see the terrible attraction to, in spite of a stadium’s worth of red flags waving about.

Rogowski vibrates like an impetuous taunt as Tomas; as if he’s decided his time has come to test the boundaries of everyone around him, at last—to finally push and push and push to see how far he can take it. How much he can devour before people start saying no, or at the least just dropping dead from the wounding. He starts in that very night of the film’s wrap party—pissed off that his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw, tremendous as ever) decides to go home early and not fête him properly Tomas hops into bed with the first person to bump into him on the dance floor, which just happens to be the school-teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), there partying with a friend.

Carelessly telling Martin of his extramarital exploits with a woman the second he gets home the next morning, everything Tomas does seems designed to unravel, from his extremely expensive tattered sweaters on down. Whishaw, the tenderest wisp of a person on the fullest of days, is here like a sheet of laundry caught twisted in a wringer—trapped, miserable, hopelessly in love with a person intent on hurting him. It’s what the kids call “literal violence” watching Ben Whishaw be treated in such a shabby manner, and the movie leans in hard.

Exarchopoulos’s Agathe feels much more vibrant in contrast, at first—this is an actress whose full cheeks always blush with life, exuberant. (Her spaghetti eating in Blue is the Warmest Color even put Barry Keoghan’s in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to shame!) And the lust she and Rogowski give life to thrums with all of that—Sachs knows how to make our blood flow, and Passages has some of the sexiest sex scenes I’ve seen on-screen in ages. (A bout of sweaty make-up sex between Tomas and Martin nearly singed my eyelashes off.) But as Passages passes on you can see the blood’s flowing out of everyone and into the vampiric Tomas, who can’t or won’t get enough until it’s only corpses, shell people piled up in his wake.

The film then, like Tomas himself, feels like a bit of a taunt—perhaps a challenge is a nicer way to put it—in how it dares us to witness someone at their most wildly, vividly unlikeable, and scrounge up some understanding. But then I think for anybody who’s ever been in a toxic relationship—and my guess is that’s most people, unfortunately—this spectacle feels honest, lived in, excruciatingly true. And it’s thanks to the fearlessness of these actors and the trust that Sachs handed over to them that they bring it all so close to home you kind of want to bolt the shutters and lock the doors. Passages can be a frustrating tumult, but so too can life—this tough stuff sticks to you, as will this movie.