“You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss… The fundamental things apply… This day and age we’re living in Gives cause for apprehension…”
Of all the touchstones in all the world for Ira Sachs’ piercing, pungent “Passages,” literally his most European film to date, I didn’t expect to walk straight into “Casablanca.” But his trio of characters caught up in a bisexual triangle aren’t dealing in letters of transit between nations, just permeable borders between sensations of desire.
A three-character study like this is not the “product” that American studios even know how to categorize, let along market, let alone make. The personal cinema of looks and glances has been cast aside. Still, even the largest, most lifeless movies at some moment come to life within the gravity of the infinitesimal gesture, the flicker of desire, in the impulsive selfless (or selfish) act. Movies need the touch of a hand—from artists, between characters.
German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) has finished a new movie; at the wrap party, his husband, British graphic artist Martin (Ben Whishaw), isn’t in the mood to dance with him, and he catches sight of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher whose boyfriend had worked on the picture. They dance. Boyfriend leaves, Martin leaves. They dance, they leave together, they fuck.
Sachs says “Passages” is about “love and its complexity and intimacy”: Tomas’ turn is that he returns home in the morning, proud pup, and announces to Martin, “I had sex with a woman, can I tell you about it, please?”
Ira Sachs, 2014
From the start of his career, Sachs has been an emperor of the cool remove: he’s a keen observer, but hardly detached. The key couple of sex scenes in “Passages” are shot in unbroken long takes that are urgent fumble and rush and finish that pin his characters, and their bodies, to the physical world, of acts, facts and intertwined figures. Tomas’ first straight fuck is also his first straight fun and he’s curious and impassioned and immediately ready to badger his partner with the latest connivance. Agathe is large eyes and monumental smile, an iconic face holding the screen, while Tomas looks like he was born in eyeliner. (One of them wears pink, pointed, frosted nails, but my notes don’t indicate whether they were his or hers.) Whishaw, too, holds and denotes his space: these are stellar performances.
Sachs finds actors who fill his dramatic ellipses of his storytelling, and his central trio is no exception; they excel at simply being these characters, whether still or in tempest. “Franz is a physical being and uses his body as a form of expression,” Sachs says in the film’s press kit. “He is an actor, but also a performer, in the best of ways—intricate, layered, and alive. We wrote the film for Franz.”
Rogowski’s Tomas is always intuitively constructing conflict: he lives within the screenplay of his complicated inner life. Sachs, by turns, works with specific bits of behavior and decor, in gestures and environment, speaking as profoundly as verbal blurts within the headlong feral, often funny impulses of the characters.
The story is set in modern-day Paris, but it might as well be Berlin of any decade or century, capturing figures from paintings by Otto Dix or George Grosz. Sachs cites the “space” provided for characters in movies by Chantal Akerman and Jean Eustache, and as in his best work, there is a sweet sense of the lived-in, the quotidian. Still, the supposedly settled Tomas sniffs out fragrant strangeness.
The fifty-seven-year-old Memphis native has covered the waterfront of impulses that can make or mangle emotional involvement in the past half-century or so. His eight features include “The Delta” (1996); “Forty Shades Of Blue” (2005); “Keep The Lights On” (2012); and “Love Is Strange” (2014); “Passages” is his fifth feature with his writing partner Mauricio Zacharias.
Before the dance begins, we briefly but agonizingly see Tomas at work: he’s directing a scene, or more accurately, torturing an actor in what could be a Fassbinder den, like the cheaply rococo corner bar in “Fox and His Friends.” Tomas practices a figure’s descent down a motley staircase, in cubist play of stripping a performer bare. Again. AGAIN.
“Passages”
And then generous, sinuous, insouciant dancing, where the coupled man meets the single woman and is smitten, batting Bugs Bunny lashes, louche lizard ready to writhe without intent, dancing, his kohl-lined eyes heightening an already hungry, feral glare. (Later, Tomas even dons a shearling coat, looking like he’s nestled within a sheep he’s quietly and dispassionately devoured.)
Martin and Agathe are sartorially serene compared to Tomas: his clothing is idiosyncratic—his wardrobe strewn with cast-off, worn-and-torn but costly jumpers, loud, ready-ratty sweaters atop silly early-2000s Costume National-style striped stovepipe trousers. (No one tells this artist that his dated style choices make him not only stand out, but apart.)
This ferreting narcissist connives like he breathes, his English bearing a slight lisp, an eager student of his own chaos. He’s a study in adrenaline and vain display. Disarmingly elemental, polymorphous and multilingual, he’s trouble. First, for himself, but then, variously caterwauling, to everyone around him. He’s a wrecker, wants it all, even if it means he gets pregnant. His boundaries are fashioned from rubber; he is not fluid, he is gasoline. We don’t see his finished movie; his life is his movie.
Brief scenes, largely in a handful of intimate spaces, alternate between a soft, measured morning light and hue-struck night-interior light. (There are paintings on the walls, paintings within the painterly capture of milieus.) Cinematographer Josée Deshaies (“Saint Laurent”) shares a bird-like heartbeat with Sachs: frames may linger, but more often they anticipate how one figure will reshape the space by a few seconds. The effect is not voyeuristic, but vital, attuned, knowing.
“Passages”‘ color palette and lightly detailed decors are Almodóvar muted to dusk, and despite the references I could cite or the cinephile influences Sachs is ever-eager to firmly grasp, the cinematic style is recognizably his, transpiring within the practical yet elusive by implication. Even the elliptical dialogue of a long relationship only escapes from the cracks, phrases like, “Too bad we never made it to Brasilia”; “That’s not my fault” and “Not my fault, either.” Relationships, weathered or blooming, are opaque but dance with quicksilver flickers and intercepted glances.
Everything fundamental, but one kiss, another, sets time aside. The moment is all, especially in an extended sequence of Tomas barreling on his too-small city bicycle to the opening of his movie, formally dressed, racing across Paris from dusk to dark, a literally exhausting passage accompanied by Albert Ayler’s “Spirits Rejoice.” This man is open to all sensation, except empathy.
“Passages” opens Friday, August 11 at the Music Box.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
