Writer/director Ira Sachs’s fascination with asymmetric power relations and love of French film-maker Éric Rohmer come together in Passages, a very French, oblique and bohemian tale full of characters who have space to breathe and yet somehow manage to box themselves in. People stuck in passages.
It’s a frustrating film full of great scenes, connected up with Rohermesque fannying about – people standing around not saying very much, moodily. But what a cast. Franz Rogowski as Tomas, a young film director who we first meet directing extras to come downstairs into a club in one of the final scenes of the movie he’s shooting. They will not do it his way. Or cannot understand quite what he wants. Either way he eventually loses it, throwing his weight about in that director-as-god way and getting insulting.
Tomas is married to Martin, played by Ben Whishaw, a slightly diffident young man whose relationship with Tomas is at the take end of the give/take equation. And there’s Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a pretty primary school teacher Tomas meets at his film’s rap party. She’s literally just dumped her boyfriend and is hanging about at the bar wondering what next when Tomas approaches her. The two go home together and have sex.
Is he lording it over her, having her because he can because she’s beautiful? Is she saying “take that” to the boyfriend she’s just dumped, what with sleeping with an actual movie director and all? The explanations are opaque and they hang there.
Next day Tomas tells Martin he kissed a girl (and so much more) and he liked it. Oh. Ah. Ooh, says Martin, and puts it down to rap-party excess.
And from here a daisy chain of (power) relations forged and sundered, as Martin meets Ahmad (Erwan Keopa Falé), a tall well-built handsome writer, and falls for him, while Tomas plays make-believe (possibly) with Agathe, who is tossed hither and yon by Tomas’s changing emotional moods.
Tomas is the wild card in this, and Rogowski plays him as a ball of unresolved energy, switching this way and that as he upsets the lives of Martin and Agathe by switching back and forth between the two.
Whishaw has the toughest time of it with Martin, an underwritten character, and manages to inject a touch of iron into this figure of a man about whom not much is known – his job, background and the reason why this Brit is living in Paris seem a bit unclear.
Exarchopoulos is, once again, a titanic force. Plausibly the sort of woman who might convince a married gay man to switch sides, at least for a while, she plays Agathe as tough but undecided. She’s a teacher (again the power relations) and is unused to this sort of bohemian carrying on, though she learns fast.
The great scenes are great. There’s one where Tomas meets Agathe’s parents, who want to know, in the old-school way, whether Tomas’s intentions towards their daughter are honourable. It’s a scene of such emotional awkwardness – Agathe’s father (Olivier Rabourdin) incapable of saying a word he’s so furious, while her mother (Caroline Chaniolleau) asks questions so sharp they could etch glass.
There’s another one, when Agathe overhears what’s going on after Tomas and Martin reconcile sexually while she’s waiting in bed for Tomas to join her. Later, another one when Martin and Agathe meet to parlay and he brings a gift which turns out to be as inappropriate as it could possibly be.
For all the force of Rogowski’s performance, it’s never exactly clear what Tomas has that makes two sensible adults make fools of themselves over him. He seems petulant rather than strong; quick rather than wise.
In short it all seems more like an exercise in Rohmer-esque film-making than an Ira Sachs film. Perhaps the French locations have tilted Sachs too far towards a director he worships. It’s still good, just not up there with Sachs’s best, which, to my mind, remains 2005’s Forty Shades of Blue.
Passages – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
