Passages

Director: Ira Sachs (France, Germany). Year of Release: 2023

Paris, a cellar bar where a film shoot is taking place. Every so often, a woman shouts “Cut” and “Roll cameras” or whatever in French, but the man who’s obviously in charge is speaking English with a German accent. As an extra walks down stairs, the director berates him for not looking casual enough, ordering them to reshoot the scene again. And again. When he sees another extra with an empty wine glass not looking the right way, he goes mad.

Tomas doesn’t appear to be an easy man to live with, so it’s useful for him that his English husband Martin is so polite. At the wrap party, while Tomas is eager to dance, Martin wants to go home and have a good sleep. When a woman comes to the bar, having just dumped her clingy boyfriend, Tomas chats her up, although Martin is still standing next to him. After Martin leaves, Tomas and Agathe dance provocatively and end up sleeping together.

Cycling home in the morning, Tomas is eager to share his good news. “I just slept with a woman”, he tells Martin, “It was something different. Can I tell you about it please?” While this may be the first time that Tomas has slept with a woman, Martin is accustomed to his infidelity and insensitivity. When Tomas asks why Martin can’t feel happy for him, Martin sighs and says that they’ll talk about it later.

There then follows a love triangle, although the exact shape of what ensues is probably more complicated than that. Tomas moves in with Agathe, and gets her pregnant. Meanwhile he doesn’t see why this should get in the way with his relationship with Martin. After a while, Martin has enough, and tells Tomas that enough is enough. He starts seeing a French author, someone who seems more sensitive to his needs.

This would all be fine if Tomas didn’t keep turning up unannounced, and just expecting Martin to cater for him. Even when Martin’s new boyfriend is in the bedroom, Tomas demands Martin’s attention. Martin tells Tomas to hand over his keys, but this does not stop him coming round at all hours. Martin is too weak to say no, and too conflicted, knowing that part of him just wants his old lover back.

On more than one occasion, Tomas returns for some make-up sex. Martin usually complies, even when Agathe is in the next room of a house in which the walls are desperately thin. While both Martin and Agathe can see exactly what sort of man they’ve got involved with – at one stage, Tomas manically invades the classroom where Agathe is giving a lesson – they are both unable to say no. Tomas may be unappealing to us, but he clearly has something.

Passages feels like a good idea. Take one of the leading actors from 3 countries – her out of Blue is the Warmest Colour, him out of Paddington and James Bond, and him out of pretty much every German independent film of the past decade. It’s strange seeing Franz Rogowski speak English (and a little bit of French). He has a bit of a lisp and seems more effete than in his German films. Or maybe he’s just acting.

While some critics are in awe of Rogowski’s beauty, others, including myself, are not so sure. I’ve always found him more funny looking than pretty. I can’t help remembering his earlier films when he played social outcasts (but then again, in Lars and the woman, Ryan Gosling

wore a dodgy moustache and found it easier to build a platonic relationship with a blow-up doll than with a real woman, and it doesn’t seem to have affected his sex appeal).

As a result, I’ve always found Rogowski’s performances to be more creepy than beautiful. This isn’t a bad thing. His Tomas is not someone you’d like to spend much time with – unless you’d fallen in love with him, which many people do. He is compelling, sinister, and needy, often all at the same time. He is also incredibly vain – one of the great strengths of the film, and Rogowski’s performance is that he nonetheless somehow compels our attention.

To a degree, Ben Wishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as Martin and Agathe, are playing national stereotypes – he the repressed Englishman, she the sensuous Frenchwoman. Maybe Franz Rogowski’s Tomas is also a stereotype, but I lost track on what Germans are supposed to be like nowadays. Maybe the hedonistic Berliner Techno fan? But Tomas is from Bremen, where I’m sure there’s less of that sort of thing going on.

I did enjoy watching Passages while I was in the cinema, but not much has stayed with me. It’s always a fine balance when the main character is unsympathetic, and it didn’t do much to try to win our affection. Martin and Tomas row about whether they should sell their house in the country. Seriously? Things must be terrible for them. I don’t know how we were supposed to respond to that scene, but my main reaction was one of alienation.

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, Passages was trying to say. And yet, there was something slightly compelling about it all. Of course the acting is first rate – you wouldn’t expect anything less from such a cast. And while I never really liked Tomas, there was something seductive about his wheedling. You could see why Martin and Agathe let him mess up their lives.

Ultimately, though, this wasn’t really a challenging film. Apparently there’s been a bit of fuss about the sex scenes. I wasn’t outraged by them, but they did get a bit repetitive and boring. But if they annoyed the right sort of homophobe, I won’t complain. I guess this sums up my attitude to the film as a whole. Worth seeing as something to digest while it’s there, but more an amuse bouche than anything of any real substance.