Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Jorge (because I could not find his first choice)

Despite recognizing that Ira Sachs is indeed a major filmmaker -- one who has made one film I actually really like -- I feel as though Passages is, as they say on cable news, a nothingburger. Its flaws are fairly obvious, as are its few significant strengths. As such, I fear I don't have very much to say about it. If you subscribe to Mike's Patreon (and if you don't, why the hell not?), you've probably seen his dissection of Passages, and I don't have a lot to add. Sachs is staking all his chips on Franz Rogowski's admittedly solid performance as a self-pitying narcissist. In fact, Passages spends so little time exploring or even considering the interior worlds of Tomas's two love interests that for the film to make sense, I arrive at an interpretation that, while plausible, also feels like special pleading.

Is Sachs trying to mimic the capricious, self-serving mindset of a narcissist, not only through its myopic narrative focus (all Tomas, all the time) but also through its jagged, disruptive editing? No scene ever seems to come to completion, and most of them begin without any discernible context. It's just Tomas ranting, or Tomas begging, or Tomas upbraiding someone who had the audacity to ask something of him (fidelity, honesty) that he's unequipped to provide. Watching Passages is like being locked inside a the viewpoint of someone bipolar, or has a borderline personality, all disruption and caprice.

Sachs has stated on a few occasions that he has been influenced by Maurice Pialat, whose editing is quite literally elliptical. In a straight cut, one never knows whether a few hours, days, or years have passed, and it's only through keeping the previous scene in mind and gauging it against the present one that we can try to make those connections. (The most radical adaptation of Pialat's method can be found in Angela Schanelec's films.) In Passages, however, we can tell we are on a pretty condensed timeline. This is an epic work by no means, and is almost claustrophobic in its intimacy.

So the gappiness (?) in Passage's narrative progression suggests some attempt at negative space, a way to display effects of cruel actions while withholding their ostensible causes. This may work theoretically. Tomas is forever justifying himself to his husband Martin (a squandered Ben Whishaw) and his new lady fixation Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos, whose emotional blankness as an actor seems to be misread by directors as "rawness"), and we are deprived of a broader context. The marriage has no history. Tomas's bisexual turn is not explored as an issue. And by the time we get a scene between Agathe and Martin, it's too little too late. We get a sense of possible conflict and motivation, but Sachs has given us so little to hang our spectatorship on that when we watch the cafe scene, it feels like we are being asked to perform CPR on the entire film. I am not responsible for imbuing Passages with life. That's the filmmaker's job.