Programme Notes: Passages

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Passages

Warning: these programme notes may contain spoilers and may be best read after the film

Ira Sachs’ Passages opens on a film set, presided over by Franz Rogowski’s control freak director Tomas. It’s the last day of shooting, but something isn’t going right: one of the young actors, dolled up in Weimar-via-Fassbinder costume, is walking down the stairs all wrong. “This is just a transition moment,” Tomas bickers, “but you’re turning it into a huge drama moment!” It’s a revealing scene, not just because we immediately learn that Tomas is a nightmare, but because he’s so caught up with transition, with the passages between destinations. Driven by an extraordinary performance by Rogowski, he will spend the next 90 minutes turning his own transitory movement into huge drama moments, striving for a constant state of liberation at considerable cost to those around him.

We meet Tomas as he sprints into the first of these moments. After his film’s wrap party at a club in Paris, he goes home with a young woman, Agathe, played by an ever-magnetic Adèle Exarchopoulos. This turns out to be a sexually revelatory experience, which he can’t wait to rush home and recount to his husband Martin, played with characteristic wisdom and care by Ben Whishaw. Although Martin initially expresses a long-practiced patience, this seems to be the last straw for their marriage, and Tomas moves out, landing at Agathe’s with a plant and some boxes. While initially excited by his new sexual and emotional liberty, Tomas can’t (or won’t) settle, and spends the rest of the film hurtling between his two lovers, repelled like a mismatched magnet when the reality of relationships — parents, pregnancy, unremarkable midweek meals — creeps into frame.

At a post-screening Q&A for the film in London, Ira Sachs defined Passages as an ‘action film’, and it is — its meaning, plot and emotional resonance lies in its characters’ movement between states. Tomas’ unsettled nature and his literal movement between his two lovers — speeding on his bike down the streets of Paris — is driven by his desire, and by his need for autonomy at any cost. He’s itchy and restless, single-minded in his pursuit of what he wants. In contrast, Whishaw’s Martin is careful and composed, gentle and thoughtful with his words and touch. Tomas loves him, but his purposeful stillness is intolerable.

Agathe is initially more of a match for Tomas’ energy, especially in one of the film’s extremely hot sex scenes, but we gradually see her temper down, slow from the fantasy of movement into the reality of a fixed point in Tomas’ life. After she tells him she’s pregnant with his child, he dashes across town to sleep with Martin, telling him the reason afterwards in a scene that shows off Rogowski’s incredible sense of tragicomic timing. Later in the film, all of Tomas’ lovers and friends gather at a cottage in a utopian vision of queer family, a very real environment in which they could raise a child — but Tomas sabotages. Any version of settling down is suffocating to him.

It’s refreshing to watch a queer relationship drama that is so propelled by action, by bodies, by unspoken desire rather than words, explanation, definition. It also feels significant — and true to life — that the characters’ sexualities are declared through actions rather than words. Sachs also propels the action of the film through controlled editing, and by what he chooses to reveal and conceal. Scenes open immediately after an argument, or in the middle of sex. Characters refer to big moments that we don’t see on screen. Martin gets a new boyfriend — played by the sublime Erwan Kepoa Falé — but we only really see them on the precipice of their relationship, and at the eventual (Tomas-caused) fallout.

Another key site of action is the film’s exquisite costuming by Khadija Zeggaï. The central trio’s clothes are beautiful and characterful in their own right, but they also serve to highlight the characters’ sense of movement between spaces, contexts and lovers. Tomas throws a teddy bear fur coat over his party outfit, his sweatpants, his pyjamas — always ready to go. A gossamer-thin, bright red robe is seen draped over Whishaw’s delicate frame early on, and is later borrowed by the much stockier Falé. In a particularly funny sequence, Tomas wears a sheer crop top and leopard print trousers to seduce Martin, only to have to cycle to Agathe’s apartment the next morning for lunch with her parents — turning this silly, sexy, instantly iconic outfit from the sublime to the ridiculous. This dynamic use of costumes is reminiscent of our contemporary age’s other great sensual filmmaker, Luca Guadanigno, as well as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose personal temperament and sexual fluidity is surely consciously reflected in the character of Tomas.

In the film’s closing sequence, Tomas is at Martin’s apartment in a tuxedo, ready to board a plane and step straight onto the red carpet at his film’s Venice premiere. But Martin won’t go with him. He’s in sweatpants gently cooking some vegetables instead. He wants his life back, and his life can’t contain the erratic explosion of Tomas’ existence. So Tomas goes to Agathe — who is at work, teaching primary school children. She refuses him too, and he melts down in the corridor. The sublime to the ridiculous. He’s back out on his bike, his teddy bear coat over his tux, eyes ahead, no fixed destination. Like the protagonist of Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, he’s pursued liberation at any cost, and he’s living the consequences — autonomous, alone, always moving. A burst of free jazz plays, falling apart and collecting itself. His expression is ambiguous. The frame freezes, because the film has to stop somewhere, but it could be entirely arbitrary — outside of this story, Tomas will keep going, keep hurtling between fixed points, never losing speed as the people around him fall.

Claire Biddles

Music, film and arts writer

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