Review: ‘Passages’ is a compelling sexual triangle set in Paris — and a 2023 film standout
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Five minutes into “Passages,” a scene from a marriage takes a casually fateful turn, and one of the year’s best films is off and running to destinations unknown.
Late at night, a noisy Paris bistro is hosting a party for a film crew’s recent completion of a feature. The director, a live-wire German emigré named Tomas, wants to dance. His reticent English husband Martin, sitting somewhat wearily at the bar, declines; the woman sitting next to Martin, French schoolteacher Agathe, volunteers.
Eighty minutes later, director and co-writer Ira Sachs’ sexual triangle comes to a perfectly judged conclusion that feels like the only possible way to close the book on these three characters. They’re played, with unerring skill, by Franz Rogowski (Tomas), Ben Whishaw (Martin) and, as the woman in this tale of a man, a man and a woman, Adèle Exarchopoulos.
As we soon learn, Tomas leads with a voracious sexual appetite incarnate. He’s a beguiling, needy, Michael “Chorus Line” Bennett-sort of narcissist who shoots first and forgets the questions he might be asking himself later. After sleeping with Agathe the night of the party, Tomas cycles home, tired but giddy. Martin, we gather, has been in this cuckolded position before, though the script leaves the terms of their marriage, and the sexual histories of the characters, unstated.
All we know is what we hear from Martin the morning after at their apartment: that this always happens “when you finish a film.”
The escalation of events, rapid but inevitable, feels natural in its pacing and indicates the rightness of tone established by Sachs and his frequent writing partner Mauricio Zacharias. (Arlette Langmann is credited with additional dialogue.) Tomas packs up some boxes and moves into Agathe’s place. Martin, a graphic designer, embarks on an affair with a novelist and literary editor (Erwan Kepoa Falé),which sparks Tomas’ jealousy while dampening whatever he has with Agathe.
Much more happens in “Passages,” including some bracingly honest scenes of intimacy and male nudity that garnered an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association. OK, first of all: That’s hypocritical and misjudged in the extreme — albeit a typical extreme in America, where we sexualize everything except sex and don’t mind an R rating for the most explicit violence but freak out about simulated lovemaking, especially gay lovemaking. Sachs, making his first film outside the U.S., called the rating “cultural censorship,” and an indication of homophobia that, if anything, is gaining ground, not losing it.
The filmmaker has been here before. One of Sachs’ earlier films, “Love is Strange” starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, got an R rating for the lamest of reasons. A few f-words. Nearly a decade later, we’re still dealing with a volunteer ratings board that does not know what it is doing, though you get the feeling it sleeps better at night as long as we continue to give brutality a free pass and sexuality every conceivable ratings obstacle.
“Passages” does not disguise Tomas’ reckless impulses and motivations; it does not explain anybody’s behavior, or feelings, because explanations aren’t the stuff of drama. Contradictions, ambiguities, messy internal conflicts are, however they feed the story. The pillow talk in this compact yet fluid portrait of confusion and desire says a great deal with very few words.
At one point (several, in fact) Tomas says to Agathe: “I love you.” Agathe tells Tomas she doesn’t know whether to believe him. “I say it when I feel it,” he says.
“You say it when it works for you,” she replies, and that rejoinder — no false dramatics, barely any inflection — is one of a hundred little moments that stick in “Passages.”
“Passages” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: NC-17 (for nudity and depictions of sex)
Running time: 1:31
How to watch: Premieres in select theaters Aug. 11, including at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
