Passages (2023, Ira Sachs) (Patreon)

40/100

I've seen every one of Sachs' features going back to Forty Shades of Blue, and each has disappointed me in its own distinct way. (Highest rating: 50, for Married Life.) Here, he's made a bold decision that I admire in principle but find immensely frustrating in practice, focusing on a single rotten leg of his love (or sex) triangle to the effective exclusion of its other two, omitting almost every conventionally dramatic scene that might have provided Martin and Agathe with commensurate psychological depth. An approach that challenging requires dexterous work on every level—script, direction, performance—and I continue to find Sachs and his regular collaborator, Mauricio Zacharias, badly wanting; their instincts are commendable, but I never fundamentally believe anything that I'm seeing in their films. My breaking point in Passages was a shot of Agathe listening to Tomas and Martin playfully wrestle, clearly as a prelude to fucking, in the other room: It's clear from her expression that she's unhappy, but since we have no idea how she reacted when Tomas presumably proposed the idea of a polyamorous relationship in which the three of them would raise her and Tomas' as-yet-unborn child together—the movie just blithely skips past that bombshell of a conversation, along with several others no less potentially conflagratory—there's no way to abscribe any meaning to her misery. Did she agree, and now regret having done so? Did she decline, only to have Tomas openly defy her wishes? Did he broach the subject honestly or deceptively? It makes a goddamn difference! One could argue that the film's perverse Tomas-centric POV demands a certain amount of opacity, but then why are we observing this moment to which Tomas is not privy in the first place? Why, if that's the artistic stratagem, do we get the late meeting between Martin and Agathe, which violates it so blatantly that there's no point in having Tomas ping-pong between comparative voids? Neither Martin nor Agathe ever comes across as more than an empty vehicle for Tomas to repeatedly, narcissistically sideswipe, and Passages isn't disciplined enough (despite some excellent individual shots, e.g. one in which Tomas' body completely obscures Martin's as they argue in bed at night) to make that dynamic compelling to me. Nice to see frank sexuality onscreen for a change, but that's the only level on which anyone connects. 

Oh, also: Loved the opening scene, but what I took from it apparently had zilch to do with what Sachs and Zacharias meant to communicate. Tomas' obsession with the way that one actor walks down a flight of stairs (and later the way that another holds her drink) suggested crippling self-consciousness as a theme, but being on the lookout for that paid no dividends at all. Was it just meant to establish Tomas as an asshole? Because, sorry, he's right—most people can't simply walk worth a damn when they know that a camera's pointed at them. They try to act "I'm walking down the stairs" and wind up looking bizarrely unnatural. That's why most people can't act. So I didn't see a red flag there at all, and just assumed that Sachs was poking mild fun at a frustrating aspect of his own job.