Filmmaker Tomas Freiburg (Franz Rogowski) does not seem like a guy who'd inspire intense romantic ardor. He's introduced in the first scene of Passages fussily nitpicking about tiny details in a scene of a movie he's directing, repeatedly halting production so he can berate an actor about the way he walks down a flight of stairs. Yet there's obviously something magnetic about Tomas, who's apparently a successful and revered filmmaker and is frequently the center of attention at social gatherings.
Tomas basks in that attention, and it's clear that his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), is used to Tomas unapologetically wandering off for various trysts, unconcerned about the effect that might have on Martin. Tomas' latest fling is with beautiful school teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and it quickly becomes more serious than past dalliances. It's not quite accurate to call the relationship an affair, since Tomas tells Martin about it the morning after he first sleeps with Agathe, but it's not like Tomas and Martin are in an open marriage, either. Tomas just does whatever he wants whenever he wants to, and he assumes that everyone else will tolerate and even praise his behavior.
Tomas' monstrous narcissism makes him tough to engage with as a protagonist, and both Martin and Agathe come off as such decent, level-headed people that it's hard to fathom why they are both so passionately in love with Tomas. Yet director and co-writer Ira Sachs still makes Passages into a compelling character study, in part because it examines its characters making such terrible choices. It takes a while to connect with the movie, since Tomas can be so abrasive, but there's a stealth cumulative power to the story. The final scenes make an especially strong emotional impact after viewers have spent nearly 90 minutes getting to know these people and their various hang-ups and insecurities.
Sachs, whose acclaimed films include 2014's Love Is Strange and 2016's Little Men, has a history of making engaging dramas about people in uncomfortable situations made worse by their own lack of self-awareness. Passages builds on those themes, and even small moments of Martin or Agathe pushing back against Tomas feel like major victories. Sachs expertly creates tension in mundane encounters like Tomas meeting Agathe's parents for the first time or Tomas and Martin discussing how to split their share in a vacation house they own.
Those scenes are deliberately difficult to watch, and for all its unbridled passion and lust, Passages maintains a somewhat dour tone. Before being released unrated, the movie notoriously received an NC-17 rating, presumably for a lengthy explicit sex scene between Tomas and Martin, but anyone looking for titillation or sumptuous eroticism will be disappointed. The sex is largely joyless, just an expression of Tomas' own ego, another way to manipulate and devalue the people in his life. He makes them feel bad, then he makes them feel even worse for complaining about how he made them feel in the first place.
Passages isn't entirely a downer, though, and the vibrant performances bring these characters to life, Tomas included. The movie is set in Paris' cosmopolitan artistic community, where sexuality and personal expression are equally fluid. For Tomas, the two are often the same, and his romantic relationships are as performative as the films he makes. The difference is that these are real people he's using for his own gratification, not fictional characters he can mold as he sees fit. Whether he eventually understands or accepts the difference is something that Sachs leaves it up to the audience to work out. ♦
PASSAGES
