‘Passages’ review: The compelling queer drama the MPA doesn’t want you to see

Major event releases like Barbie and Oppenheimer may have brought audiences back to cinemas, but it’s films like Passages that will no doubt keep them there during the oncoming, strike-centric studio drought. However, the rigorous queer romance has found itself between a rock and a hard place. Its controversial NC-17 rating — which its director calls “a form of cultural censorship” — has prompted MUBI to release it unrated, which limits the number of theaters that might be willing to play it.  

The French production (shot largely in English) is directed by American filmmaker Ira Sachs, whose 2012 indie Keep The Lights On was based on his own relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg. Some of those autobiographical elements end up in Passages too, but the film is strikingly original in its conception of a marriage nearing its bitter end. Sachs presents, from his opening scene, a thoroughly detestable protagonist: On the last day of his independent Parisian production, German filmmaker Tomas gripes angrily with extras and actors over minor idiosyncrasies in the way only a high-strung, arrogant male artist would. However, what should be utterly repulsive on paper is immediately counter-weighted with empathetic allure, thanks to the masterful casting of German arthouse sensation Franz Rogowski (Transit).

Over the course of 90 minutes, the strained relationship between Tomas and his English print-shop artist husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) — exacerbated by an unexpected affair with a Frenchwoman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) — leads to riveting interpersonal drama crafted with precision and care.

Rogowski, Whishaw, and Exarchopoulos are exceptional in Passages. 

Any film that could conceivably be re-titled The Worst Person in the World runs the risk of alienating casual viewers, but Passages ensures a thorough and immediate understanding of each character, even in their worst, most rankling moments. When we meet Martin, for instance, he’s somewhere between the end of his rope and the edge of a cliff, both fed up with Tomas for reasons yet unknown to us and trapped in his marriage to him by forces yet unseen. 

Is Martin being unreasonable when he leaves Tomas’s wrap party early, after refusing to dance with him? That’s one way of looking at it, and perhaps it’s how Tomas sees things; he’s a man who wants to be celebrated, after all. It’s likely why Sachs presents Martin this way in the first place, with Whishaw lugging around emotional baggage which the audience can’t yet parse and which Tomas refuses to acknowledge. 

Whishaw, who plays the meekest, daintiest ever version of “Q” in Daniel Craig’s Bond films and voices the kindly Paddington bear, uses his quivering voice to create in Martin a quiet magnetism. He harbors a suppressed melancholy at every turn, creating wordless reminders that for all of Tomas’s charm and apparent brilliance (or so we’re told — we never see his films), there’s a selfish undercurrent to him that harms anyone in his orbit.

However, this portrait of Tomas is immediately subverted when the filmmaker meets Agathe at that very same party, a young teacher whose own relationship woes lead her to rebound with Tomas. As Agathe, Exarchopoulos walks a fine line between fragility and resolve, creating an emotional space in which Tomas readily inserts himself, resulting in moments of mutual passion as well as adolescent mischief. Two modes of Martin are presented through Martin and Agathe’s respective experiences. Where Tomas is subjugated by Martin, Agathe feels liberated by him.

At the center of it all is Rogowski. He’s Sachs’s secret weapon, an actor who makes mesh and crop tops more masculine than they’ve ever been, and whose lifelong lisp and deep, thoughtful, constantly weary eyes help Tomas exude a puppy dog vulnerability. His words veer between piercingly funny and simply piercing. The casualness with which he admits his affair to Martin early on (and the diminutive silence with which Whishaw accepts it) raises a million questions about their relationship. Even this minor interaction is tinged with everything from callousness to soul-bearing honesty, creating an emotional mystery of sorts whose answers always lie on the tip of the movie’s tongue, thanks to Rogowski’s performance: Is theirs an open marriage? And if so, what say did Martin have in its terms — if any at all? 

Ira Sachs’s brings subtle flourishes to every scene of Passages.

The anguish Tomas causes both Martin and Agathe as he ping-pongs between them is equaled only by the anguish he claims to feel — or perhaps even genuinely feels, in his own narcissistic way — at the first sign of minor pushback by either partner the second they reclaim any sense of autonomy. 

Sachs, for the most part, keeps us tethered to Tomas’s point of view, rarely sharing the wider picture of Martin and Agathe’s day-to-day beyond scant details of their respective jobs. However, even these workspaces are defined not by Martin and Agathe’s presence within them but by the empty hallways nearby, representing both an emptiness — some physical or emotional lack, where Tomas ought to be — as well as the intimidating possibility that he might just show up unannounced, performing some grand (if ultimately self-serving) romantic gesture. Rogowski’s layered and volatile work is complemented, even magnified, by this looming, dueling sense of desire and dread.

Tomas’s absence is felt in each scene thanks to how Sachs directs his presence, from the overbearing energy with which he enters a room — he has a subtle saunter that lacks overt frills but still keeps you on edge — to the way even his stillness is captured within the frame. During several emotionally intimate scenes, Tomas’s back is entirely to the camera. Martin, in these moments, ought to be the dramatic fulcrum, but Whishaw knows exactly when not to move, and when to approach the material with painful restraint. In this way, Rogowski sets the scene’s mood through posture alone, as he dominates the frame.

It’s a stunning example of performance and direction via body language, a commitment each actor makes even during the many (tastefully shot, mostly clothed, but still arousing and impassioned) sex scenes. When sex is a mutual act in which they become swept up and entangled, Sachs and cinematographer Josée Deshaies allow both combinations of actors — Rogowski with either Whishaw or Exarchopoulos — to dictate the film’s physical and emotional rhythms. However, when Tomas is caught up in his own world, when intimacy becomes either a distant or selfish act, the camera practically frames his partners out. It may as well be a scene of masturbation.

Then again, Passages as a whole is the physically and intellectually masturbatory saga of its detestable lead, whose actions are frequently amusing but constantly frustrating, if not outright enraging. However, the emotional impetus behind each decision is always crystal clear, without the need for verbal confirmation, as if in firm rebuke to the artistically limiting, “save-the-cat” Hollywood wisdom that dictates an audience’s need to like a character in order to connect with them. They more likely need to understand them on some fundamental level, and Sachs and Rogowski ensure this at every turn, creating a complicated queer saga that bucks the binary notions of “good” or “bad” representation which has come to dominate mainstream, studio-centric discourse. These labels seldom matter when the result is this nuanced and this human, making it all the more enraging that the MPA doesn’t seem to want Passages seen by large swaths of viewers.

The sex scenes in Passages are undeserving of an NC-17 rating.

The designation foisted on Passages is nothing short of kowtowing to right-wing moral panic. The NC-17 rating (the 1990 replacement for the “X” rating given to films like Last Tango In Paris) has, even in the context of the MPA’s arbitrary rules, been generally associated with severe violence and explicit sexual depictions. For instance, in the notoriously grotesque exploitation movie A Serbian Film, the reasoning for which was listed as “extreme aberrant sexual and violent content including explicit dialogue.” While the MPA has been a voluntary alternative to government censorship since 1945, it has often been mired in controversy, between its paradoxical tolerance of wanton violence while bringing the hammer down on mild language and sexuality.

However, even within the bounds of what the MPA has generally rated NC-17 for sexual material (like the 1997 re-release of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos), Passages hardly fits the bill. There isn’t a naked breast to be seen, or even the depiction of a sexual act that might slightly reveal anything but a few shots of bare buttocks. Even Oppenheimer was more explicit in its depiction of sex and nudity, but it was rated R, which allows anyone to be admitted in the presence of an adult. According to director Nicholas Stoller, the MPA (then the MPAA) gave his 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall an R-rating rather than an NC-17 despite gratuitous shots of Jason Segel’s penis, because it was not erect. The most you can glimpse in Passages is a few frames of a supporting character’s similarly flaccid member as he wraps a towel around his waist.

The difference, of course, is that Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a heterosexual comedy; similarly, Oppenheimer depicts sex between straight characters. Passages, meanwhile, is an unapologetically queer drama from an openly gay filmmaker, and it arrives on American screens at a time when conservative politicians have become increasingly obsessed with policing queerness — a level of “save the children” moral panic likely unseen since Anita Bryant in the 1970s.

It therefore follows that even a film as relatively tame in its depictions of sex — implicit and softcore at greatest, though always character-centric — would effectively be the target moral panic, since the populist American right wing tends to drum up fear by casting transgender people, drag queens, and other queer folks as threatening to children. By branding it with an NC-17, the MPA effectively forces MUBI to either recut the film for an R-rating or to release it unrated and limit its commercial prospects. 

Fittingly, Passages is exactly the kind of film that ensures an ostensibly normal understanding of modern queerness, whether from a sexual or cultural standpoint. It presents fluid characters whose love and self-loathing are complex and lived-in, and whose lives beat with the kind of vibrant humanity that certain political factions would rather see denied. 

Passages wasn’t ever intended to be some political revolutionary work of art, but the circumstances of its US release have forced it into that position. Its extrapolation of the painful, complicated chaos of romance from beneath the ordinary has, itself, become extraordinary in the process. 

Passages opens in theaters Aug. 4.