Ira Sachs (2023)
I didn’t intend to bother with another Ira Sachs film after the ludicrous Frankie (2019) but he keeps attracting strong casts – Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos this time around – so I’ve gone back for more. As usual, the screenplay is by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias but Passages is very different from their other collaborations during the last decade (Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016) before Frankie). The new film includes plenty of sex scenes, few and far between in Sachs movies since Keep the Lights On (2012). It also features, in contrast to the mostly benign treatment of characters in his last three pictures, a toxic narcissist of a protagonist. Neither of these things makes Passages any better than its predecessors, except in one, perhaps unintended respect.
The story is set in Paris in the present day. Tomas Freiburg (Rogowski) is a German film-maker. His British husband Martin (Whishaw) is a printer. In the opening sequence, Tomas is shooting the last scene of his latest picture (also called ‘Passages’!). We can see that he’s a demanding director, not averse to yelling at his actors or extras, but this hardly prepares the audience for the stinker that Tomas proves to be in his private life. At the wrap party, when Martin says he doesn’t want to dance, Tomas dances instead with a young woman called Agathe (Exarchopoulos). Martin leaves the party soon afterwards; Tomas goes back to Agathe’s apartment, where they sleep together. Next morning, he returns to Martin and wants to talk to him about having had sex with a woman – about feeling ‘something I’ve not felt in a long time’. Martin reasonably finds it hard to share his husband’s excitement about this and they have the first of several rows. Tomas quickly gets to work on editing his film; he bumps into Agathe outside the editing room; they have more sex without further ado. Martin, meanwhile, meets Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), the author of a recent, well-received novel, and they too start an affair. But while both Tomas and Martin are playing away, they also have sex with each other (this is the longest and, to watch, most gruelling sex bout in Passages). Tomas isn’t even out of bed the following morning before announcing to Martin that Agathe is pregnant.
I’m failing to cut what feels like a long story (though it runs only ninety-two minutes) short – so a short break from the synopsis. The film raises only two halfway interesting questions. First, how obnoxious are we meant to find Tomas? Second, how significant is it that he’s a film-maker? The sharply differing responses to Passages of two well-known American critics earlier this year are instructive. In her Artforum review, Amy Taubin brackets the film with Celine Song’s Past Lives which, like Sachs’s, premiered at Sundance in January 2023. Taubin notes that ‘Both films romanticize triangular relationships in which the apex figure is a master manipulator. … Life experience makes me judge [the two ‘apex figures’] more harshly than do their respective film’s directors, and I would have preferred not to have spent two hours with either of them’. As I watched Passages, it occurred to me that Richard Brody would love it: he’s not only a Sachs fan but also tends to give brownie points to movies whose characters are creatives – as if that were enough to make the picture they’re in a work of art. Sure enough, Brody’s New Yorker piece carries the sub-headline ‘The suffering in Ira Sachs’s remarkable film results not from cruelty but from truth’ and concludes that ‘the realm of emotional and sexual freedom that Passages explores … is more than a personal prerogative. It is the crucible of imagination, the hallmark of progressive politics, and the essence of art’.
Brody’s argument might be sustainable if Sachs conveyed any sense of Tomas’s film-making credo or achievements – something he almost completely declines to do (beyond the unilluminating first sequence). Amy Taubin tersely describes Tomas as ‘a bisexual man modeled on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but without any discernible talent’. Brody knows better. He claims that ‘what guarantees the fictional Tomas’s artistry isn’t what we see of him working. Rather, it’s the way that he lives … Sachs has created a fictional character who’s no alter ego but an ideal of sorts: he embodies the freedom of thought and action on which the very notion of art is based’. Having it both ways, Brody then asserts, nonsensically, that ‘[Tomas’s] films are never shown, but Sachs leaves us in little doubt that they are good’.
Back to the torture-soap plot … It turns out that Martin has always wanted a child though Tomas didn’t. When he meets Agathe’s parents (Caroline Chaniolleau and Olivier Rabourdin), her mother – in response to Tomas’s airy remark that he may go back to live in Germany if he feels like it – has the temerity to express concern as to whether he’ll be a responsible parent. Tomas doesn’t like this and suggests to Martin that they create their own family by raising Agathe’s baby – a suggestion Tomas doesn’t check out with Agathe, who’s keen to be a mother, before he makes it. Martin breaks off with Amad, despite the latter’s warning that Tomas is very bad for him. As well as the apartment in Paris, Tomas and Martin have a house in the country. (Those who consider Ira Sachs an auteur will be pleased that the break-up of Tomas and Martin enables some discussion of property prices – unquestionably a Sachsian trope.) When Agathe, along with some of their other friends, joins them at the house one weekend, she can hear the hosts having sex in the room next door to the one where she thought she’d be sharing a bed with Tomas. She decides to break with him. In the final part of the film, Tomas and Martin, apparently if inexplicably reconciled, are about to go to Venice together for several weeks. A few hours before their departure, Martin meets with Agathe to give her a present – a little jacket for the baby. She informs him that she’s had an abortion and expresses surprise that Tomas didn’t tell Martin that. Martin, more than surprised, refuses to go to Venice. He tells Tomas not to try and make contact with him in future. Tomas gets on his bicycle (one of his many annoying habits is bringing this indoors, wherever he happens to be). He heads off to make a last-ditch appeal to Agathe.
You can’t say that the three main actors aren’t good. Franz Rogowski shows, as well as dynamic conviction, integrity: he neither evidently approves of nor obviously condemns Tomas. Ben Whishaw gives Martin what seems like fifty shades of petulance, some of which bring desperately needed humour to proceedings; when he’s at work, Martin is, in (credible) contrast, affably efficient. Adèle Exarchopoulos has much less to say than either Rogowski or Whishaw. Because she has such natural warmth as a performer, this relative paucity of lines gets to be rather expressive: it seems to underline how little Agathe can dictate what happens. Exarchopoulos’s role is underwritten in other ways, though. I wasn’t sure how Agathe came to be at the wrap party in the first place: she’s a primary school teacher (her brief interactions with the children in her class are pleasant to watch). How unimportant Agathe is to Sachs – as a character rather than a plot component – is clear from his not letting her ask Tomas a single question about his sexuality.
You can say that these actors are ill used, though. The sex scenes are mostly men only. In the few that involve Agathe and according to intensifying post-#MeToo screen convention, she keeps more clothes on than the men do. Passages has received an NC-17 (‘Adults only’) rating from the American Motion Picture Association (and a corresponding 18 rating from the BBFC). Sachs has called this ‘a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist’. This reaction, like the discretion Sachs that shows towards Adèle Exarchopoulos, is a dismaying reflection of spurious, self-serving political correctness. It doesn’t matter that Agathe is a cipher compared with Martin, let alone Tomas, because Sachs doesn’t undress her as he undresses the two main men (and Amad). How far we have come (selon Sachs) since Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), the movie that brought Adèle Exarchopoulos to international attention! And as a gay film-maker, Sachs is virtually exempt from ‘male gaze’ accusations – never mind that his extended, closely observed description of the naked bodies of his leading (male) actors in effect objectifies them.
Tomas is repeatedly amazed that he pisses people off (he must wish he had a friend as understanding as Richard Brody). In the closing stages, he tells Martin, ‘I’m so unhappy’; Martin is surely speaking for many viewers when he replies that he doesn’t care. Returning to the back-handed compliment that ended the first paragraph of this note, Passages is suspenseful as no other Sachs film that I’ve seen has been. Tomas is so repellent that I got nervous in the last ten minutes that either Martin or Agathe would give in to his plea for ‘one more chance’. Since neither of them does, you could say the movie has a happy ending. Ira Sachs will need an even stronger line-up of actors in his next film for this viewer to grant him another reprieve.
21 December 2023
