Passages examines three lives in transition, marked indelibly by a brief entanglement, in a story told less through dialogue, more through sex and the silences in between. |
EARLY in Ira Sachs’s new relationship drama Passages, at a production wrap party in a Parisian nightclub, the director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) asks his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) to dance with him, only to get turned down. Annoyed by the refusal, he hits the dance floor with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a young schoolteacher who had earlier turned down her own partner. The dissolution of one relationship teases the inception of another. Upon Martin’s leaving, the tentative flirtation between Tomas and Agathe turns much steamier. As the two study and mirror each other’s movements, they get swept into a fever dream of giddy desire. Watching their bodies writhe together, he in his black mesh top, she in her reddish pink dress, you sense desire growing from a fantasy to a yearning, as if daring both to yield to it. Tomas and Agathe indeed do yield. All the sexual tension from their dance, a prelude to sex, finds inevitable release. |
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| Passages: An Incendiary Love Triangle Makes For A Seductive But Sobering Drama About Desire |
Desire can kindle the spark in a relationship. But it can also burn everything in its path. The incendiary love triangle between Tomas, Martin and Agathe sets the stage for a seductive but sobering drama about desire in all its glorious fluidity, illogicality and unpredictability. True to its title, Passages examines three lives in transition, marked indelibly by a brief entanglement, in a story told less through dialogue, more through sex and silences in between, and performed with un-self-conscious conviction by three actors whose bodies do most of the talking. In Rogowski, Sachs finds an actor who can convey emotional volatility through sheer physicality. Tomas is petulant, insecure and fickle in his desires. Being a narcissist, he is drawn to those who allow him to direct the knotty choreography of a relationship at his pace. All he wants is his needs met. Never mind his partner’s. Meaning there is always a power imbalance in his relationships. When his self-worth isn’t validated as he feels entitled to, he seeks validation from others. Beyond the addiction to validation is a deep-seated fear of being alone. This is captured in a scene where Tomas repeatedly calls for Agathe when he is in the bath just to get a look at her. Or when he begs Martin and Agathe not to leave him. |
Nevertheless, as his relationships with Martin and Agathe prove, Tomas is caught in an endless cycle of desire and despair, with no consideration for the partners who end up caught in it with him. He is quick to fall for Agathe, idealising her like she gives him renewed purpose. But it doesn’t take long for him to devalue her too, just as he did Martin. As two people tangled in their love and loathing for the same man, Exarchopoulos and Whishaw pull off a dual high-wire act of trying to acquiesce a narcissist in parallel and in collision, all the while struggling to bottle up a tidal wave of conflicting desires from bursting forth. In the opening scene, on the set of his latest directorial effort, Tomas loses his temper over an actor not walking down a flight of stairs naturally and another not holding a drink properly — the first signs of his controlling and irascible nature. Later, when he matter-of-factly recounts his overnight sex-capade to Martin, it becomes clear this isn’t the first time. “This always happens when you finish a film,” Martin says. For Tomas, each relationship, like a film, is a quest to propel himself towards a new experience. His desire for Agathe is tied to his liberation at her not knowing him fully as Martin does. Agathe sees him with fresh eyes, not familiar with all his patterns. In novelty lies the desire. |
Once the novelty wears off however, Tomas leaves his partners to clean up the mess after him. Not long after he moves in with Agathe, Martin begins a relationship with a writer named Ahmad (Erwan Kepoa Falé). The jealousy over seeing Martin move on causes the first rupture to emerge in Tomas and Agathe’s relationship. The rupture opens wider when Tomas shows up late for lunch with Agathe’s parents, smelling of sex with Martin, and responding to a mother and father’s protective probing — as to whether he will take care of their pregnant daughter — with outright hostility. That he is so quick to take umbrage exposes an immaturity and insensitivity. A further illustration of which arrives at a get-together when he has sex with Martin knowing very well the walls are thin and Agathe could hear them. In light of the increasing coyness about sex in movies today, Passages presents a categorical defence as to why we need more people getting down and dirty on screen. Not only will doing so prompt positive conversations about sex, but also sexuality. Instead of putting labels on his characters as “bisexual” or “straight”, Sachs asserts an idea of attraction that is not fixed to a particular gender or sexual orientation. Through sex scenes, he finetunes a body language that captures what desire looks like and feels like, when dialogue moves beyond dance, when tension simmers beyond negotiation, and when desire becomes the source of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and misery, love and loss. |
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