Ira Sachs’s Passages carries the almost exotic interest of its rarified milieu as well as deeply personal overtones. Current icon of the international festival circuit Franz Rogowski adds to his already hefty portfolio of complex, seductively odd (or oddly seductive) characters as Tomas, a German filmmaker living in Paris whose meticulousness in the director’s chair gives way to a different, more manipulative kind of control of others in his personal life.
Rogowski’s performance as the restless, almost unconsciously impish Tomas might be praised as sublime for the way it transcends any attempt to pigeonhole the character as just another abusive male director. In a different sense, sublimation is precisely what Tomas struggles with. When he’s not overseeing a set, he seems to have little ability to channel his need for attention into anything but naked narcissism. After wrapping production, he’s spent, with his limited capacity for self-control having been chucked out the window. “This is what happens when you finish a film. You forget,” says his husband of 15 years, Martin (Ben Wishaw), in an effort to dismiss the dubious news that Tomas has fallen in love with a woman.
The woman in question is Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos), whom Tomas meets on the dance floor at the wrap party for his most recent film. Tomas soon begins ping-ponging back and forth between the intensity of this new love affair and the more familiar, worn-in love that he and Martin share. He wants—no, demands—both, attempting to guilt-trip a distraught Martin with pleas that the husband he’s betrayed be happy for his exploration of something new. Tomas, of course, hardly shows the same generosity of spirit when, in the wake of their break-up, Martin begins seeing a very sensitive and comparatively mature novelist (William Nadylam).
What maintains our sympathy for Tomas is the pathetic, occasionally comic obliviousness that emanates from the character. There’s a nearly honest boyish innocence to Tomas, one that helps us understand why Wishaw’s comparably composed Martin might continue to be disarmed by an unfaithful partner who makes such selfish emotional demands of him. Wishaw makes Martin’s devastation palpable as the man seesaws between utter exasperation and loving tolerance, capturing in direct but un-didactic fashion how Tomas’s bull-in-a-china-shop behavior derails any attempt at healing in the wake of their relationship’s disintegration.
Despite Tomas’s sometimes explicit professions of innocence, you get the sense that some part of him knows exactly what he’s doing as his mouth and body write checks that nobody will ever be able to cash. There’s an increasing desperation to his bike rides as he bounces between Agathe’s place and the apartment he and Martin used to share, his carelessness of others’ feelings becoming more like an overt challenge to them to finally be done with him. This hint of self-destructiveness speaks to a deeper unhappiness behind his habitual “who, me?” mien.
As specific a character as Tomas is, it’s also easy to relate to him because one crucial insight of this compact but resonant drama is that relationships always consist of giving and taking. Love allows Tomas to pass off personal fulfillment as satisfaction of the other, an alibi it can potentially provide for anybody in a relationship. Sachs stages a pair of memorably hot but oddly distanced, single-shot sex scenes—one between Tomas and Agathe, one between Tomas and Martin—that vaguely rhyme, and, moreover, encapsulate this push-and-pull ambivalence.
While there’s much acute pain in Passages, it can also be funny in a way that smacks of self-deprecation. Its knotty love triangle suggests that the need to be adored from all sides is a fundamental human desire that Tomas, for whatever reason, doesn’t know how to manage. As we watch him pedal with increasing franticness between the people who love him beyond any logical justification, it’s hard not to think: there, but for the grace of the superego, go I.
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