Ira Sachs’s rich filmography is filled with stories that find high drama within everyday interactions and conversations that spark more with what’s unsaid than what’s said. His films Love is Strange and Little Men are both about queer characters facing hostilities that are both directed at their lifestyle and others that aren’t. His interests lie in between the ways queer relationships are the same as straight ones and also the many ways they are different. His latest film, Passages, further blurs that line. It focuses on a man played by Franz Rogowski – a film director with a voracious appetite for love and sex whose struggles with impulse control cause him to often confuse the two. A narcissistic artist in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, he wrecks havoc on those who dare to enter into his web of seduction and emotional manipulation.
Where much of Sachs’s previous films focus on low-key, observational drama, Passages is an aggressive, erotically frank tale about the ways intimacy can be weaponized. Rogowski is Tomas, a filmmaker who’s just wrapped his latest film. The opening sequence showcases his exacting, argumentative personality on set. When shooting is finished, he joins the cast and crew in a dance club, wearing a mesh top, ready to dance and drink the night away. His husband, Martin (a terrific Ben Whishaw), is a more mild man, unassuming at the bar, too tired to indulge Tomas’s need to be the center of attention. When Martin leaves early, Tomas dances with one of his film’s extras, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Following her to a small house party, he ends up having sex with her.
Tomas confesses immediately to Martin the next morning, though it’s less a statement of guilt than a display arrogance. He’s cheated on Martin, and now he expects Martin to want to talk about it. Tomas believes his indiscretions are as fascinating as the drama he creates in his films, and fails to see that those closest to him aren’t willing participants in his story. It is classic main character syndrome, committing emotional terrorism on those he claims to love. Tomas spends most of Passages floating between the passionate affair with Agathe and the richer comforts of life with Martin. He cares little for their expectations of fidelity or agency, brazenly taking whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He expects his world to move at his convenience, and even as you anticipate his eventual comeuppance, Passages is not naive enough to believe that any consequence will cause Tomas to fundamentally change.
Passages was dealt an NC-17 rating, and like most directors who accomplish this, Sachs has chosen to instead release the film uncut and unrated, free of any obligations to the MPAA’s moral righteousness. This is not a movie that aspires to grace the screens of middle American multiplexes, and its embrace of its characters’ intense sexuality is one of its best traits. The film feels, to me, less graphic than your average R-rated sex drama, but the degree to which Passages is “explicit”, it is so in the transparency of its intimacy. A love scene between Rogowski and Whishaw – no doubt the cause of the red-band rating – gives you glimpses of anatomy but more so it aches with personal feeling and romantic intensity. We are up to our ears in the moral hypocrisy of MPAA, but it’s still very telling that they consistently find the honest depictions of queer sexuality to be more explicit than its straight counterparts.
Rogowski has become a rising star in the world of international and independent cinema. His severe expression mixed with the lily softness of his voice makes him perfect for characters of wanton longing and unspooled vulnerability. 2019’s Transit and 2022’s Great Freedom showed us an actor of uncommon range and gravitas, and Passages is another performance in that tradition. Sachs weaponizes the inherent kindness of his eyes and uses them to craft one of the most dastardly characters in recent memory. Like many practitioners of emotional manipulation, Tomas is aghast to see that anyone would dare commit that crime against him, and Rogowski’s take on that level of emotional insecurity is fascinating to watch. This might be the most self-centered character of 2023, but Rogowski and Sachs make him compelling – a human trainwreck that you can’t take your eyes off of.
Ben Whishaw, a tremendous performer of great delicacy, is fantastic as Martin, a spouse almost ashamed to admit the hold that his absentee husband has over him. Martin is constantly fighting for dignity within his marriage, even having his own affair with a soft-spoken author (Erwan Kepoa Falé), but his inability to shake Tomas’s volatile love ensnares him in no-win scenario. He rejects being turned into a tragic figure, but still craves whatever affection Tomas is willing to give. Exarchopoulos, playing the more unexpecting victim of Tomas’s chaos, excels as well. Her romantic hopes in giving in to Tomas’s advances, believing that she can somehow tame him, is a different kind of naiveté than Martin’s. Exarchopolous plays Agathe as a woman who fully falls for the trap that Tomas has laid out, caught completely off-guard by his wanton carelessness.
The impossibility of Tomas’s behavior can sometimes make Passages a tough watch. His commitment to exploiting all he can from those who love him take him as far from sympathetic as one can get. The script, co-written by Mauricio Zacaharias, is quite aware of the line drawn between an artist’s ego and their cruelty, that positions of power can corrupt all corners of a creator’s life. Tomas feverishly bikes across Paris, forever in search of a landing spot, never happy where he is at any moment. He’s used to people making excuses for him, forgiving his misbehavior as artistic eccentricity. Passages is unflinching in peeling back the levels of insecurity within him. That Tomas feels like a totally realistic person is very much the point. Sachs’s disinterest in any kind of redemption is a risky move, but one that works very well. He knows that monsters exist and live among us.
Directed by Ira Sachs