VOD film review: Passages (2023)
Review Overview
Cast
9Candidness
9David Farnor | On 20, Oct 2023
Director: Ira Sachs
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos
Certificate: 18
“I had sex with a woman, can I tell you about it please?” says Tomas (Franz Rogowski) to his long-standing husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw). It’s the day following the wrap party of Tomas’ latest film, and after Martin went home from the party, bored, Tomas went home with schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who was also there. Passages then spends 90 minutes dissecting the messy consequences.
Ever since Keep the Lights On, director Ira Sachs has been a masterful chronicler of both love and pain. Passages plays out like the darker counterpart to 2014’s Love Is Strange, a beautifully sweet tale of a marriage that withstood all manner of problems. Here, we watch as a relationship crumbles and crack under the pressure of one man’s whims.
Tomas’ admission of infidelity is perhaps initially an impressively frank confession – “This is always what happens,” remarks Martin – but he then follows the previous night’s mistake by trying to build a relationship with Agathe. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” he tells her. (“You say that a lot, I imagine,” she wryly reponds.) He also tells Martin: “I felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time.” His narcissitic need to follow his every feeling leads to a growing love triangle fuelled by resentment as much as attraction – it’s the most toxic triangle since Hitchcock’s Notorious.
Rather than invite us to feel sorry for Tomas, Ira Sachs uses him to pry open an intimate exploration of longing, faithfulness, family and sexuality with a fluidity that feels tender and sincere. Is Tomas in love with Agathe? Is he trying to take control of a mess he’s created? Is he still hoping that he and Martin can endure this latest trial?
The film has an intensely close-up focus on its central trio, but Sachs widens the scope just enough to spell out the collateral damage out of frame. An exquisitely observed dinner conversation with Agathe’s parents (Caroline Chaniolleau and Olivier Rabourdin) throws up all manner of barriers and clashes, as Tomas’ desires are thrown into the sharp light of day. Adèle Exarchopoulos is superb as the woman caught in his complicated web, seizing agency and seeing through Tomas’ self-centred indecision, even as she shared a genuine spark with him.
Franz Rogowski is equally excellent as the insufferable Tomas, who seems genuinely tormented but is never inexcusable. The star of the show, though, is Ben Whishaw, whose long-suffering Martin is a heartbreaking blend of loyalty and hurt. Together, they have a lived-in chemistry that goes beyond words and gestures and into the bedroom, and Sachs and his ensemble do a remarkable job of candidly capturing the relationship dynamics through some extended sex scenes that are shot tastefully by DoP Josée Deshaies.
There’s a sense, as we richochet from encounter to encounter, of how these couples’ rhythms are different and becoming more so. The result is a serious and thoughtful study of the bonds between people, of what makes a marriage, what makes a family, and what makes someone grow up. Many relationship dramas dream of this kind of raw, vulnerable honesty.