Passages

dir: Ira Sachs

2023

I watched a profoundly stupid film a couple of nights ago (no, not this one here), and one of the many exceedingly stupid moments, doubled, involves multiple people receiving a bullet through a “vascular corridor”, or passage, which looks like it’s a deathly wound, straight through the heart

It’s a location so carefully calibrated that if it’s done right, not one but two people get to survive being shot in the chest. A bullet, passing through your heart, that somehow doesn’t kill the person it’s happened to.

I thought of this when I was watching this film here Passages. In fact it’s the only positive thing that’s stayed with me from the entire experience of watching the other movie. To be fair, and I don’t want to be, to the other movie, that idea was ripped off from earlier movies, possibly even the Zhang Yimou flick Hero from over twenty years ago? Fuck!, which had someone ‘pretend’ to kill an opponent with a sword, but who perfectly places the sword stroke such that it looks like a fatal heart wound, but it’s only a scratch.

I’m belaboring the point, but this flick is called Passages, and those other flicks reference a way of giving people mortal wounds through their hearts, and yet the victims keep on living.

Maybe it won’t be a good life, but alive they remain, because of that mysterious vascular passage.

I wish I could say this flick was a hot and sexy dramedy about three people connected by lust and ego despite or because of their sexual orientations, but I can’t, because that would be me talking about Challengers, or maybe even Chasing Amy. This is a flick about someone, someone who’s a grown ass man, as they would say in the States, who acts like a giant fucking infant and who wounds all the people in his life that he claims to care about.

No, I’m not making a joke about that orange idiot who’s arisen yet again to seize his stupid throne.

But the heart, the human heart? Only a fool looks for logic within the chambers of the human heart.

As the film opens, we watch another film being filmed. The director of that flick, Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a prickly, micromanaging nightmare of a director. The film (outside of the film being made) implies that he’s a young but very successful and respected director. That may be so, but he’s an absolute shit of a human being.

The scene we saw being filmed is the end of the production, everyone’s celebrating, and Tomas wants to dance.

Tomas is actually married, don’t you know, to Martin (the great Ben Whishaw), who’s at the wrap party, and tries to talk to Agathé (the great Adele Exarchopoulos), when he sees her rejecting the advances of someone she’s been seeing during the shoot.

Martin doesn’t know her that well, they’re not friends, but for whatever reason, he really seemed keen to talk to her. When Tomas comes over and insists Martin dance with him to celebrate, Martin doesn’t want to, for whatever reason. A bit later on he tells Tomas he’s leaving.

I don’t know that there is a connection here, but it seems too coincidental to me, that the woman Martin was talking to, that frustrated Tomas, just happens to be the one that he dances with and then has sex with.

The next day he doesn’t even have the mental capacity to lie about it to Martin, and in fact wants to talk all about it! He’s genuinely thrilled that he’s had sex with a woman! What a treat! Why are you leaving the room, Martin? Don’t you want to hear all about it, every filthy detail?

There isn’t a lot of exposition in this flick, so we get pithy little statements and make some intuitive leaps. When Martin, at first, says something like “you’re always like this when you finish a film” it implies it’s happened before, as in, that Tomas has slept with other people despite their marriage vows (it doesn’t sound like they’ve got an open marriage, but who am I to be all heteronormative and conservative?). But there’s something about Tomas having sex with a woman, and being so thrilled by it that seems to hurt Martin.

Tomas doesn’t imply that he’s caught feelings for Agathé, just that it’s an amazing journey that he’s on. So every time he has sex with Agathé, presumably he’s going a bit further down the road.

Martin, inevitably, can’t stand this bullshit and feels that a clean break is required, but Tomas is all like “What’s wrong, we’re on a journey together, don’t you want to watch me grow, I want you to grow too”, and Martin, in his prim and proper way, is all “just get the fuck out of my life.”

Naturally, in between having extended sex scenes with Agathé, the last thing Tomas wants is for Martin to move on. Once the novelty of having sex with a woman wears off, Tomas is left with needing a place to live, a partner to lie to, and an ex who he neither wants to see with someone else nor happy on his own. He deliberately throws up roadblocks to them severing the financial ties between them, because, at best, he wants to have sex with whoever, regardless of their feels, and doesn’t want people to be angry with him, because it inhibits his freedom to fuck them around.

He manipulates his way back into Martin’s apartment with the pretense that he’ll agree to sell the home they share, and then ends up in bed with Martin, who kinda gives him a good seeing to (with a vengeance, from go to whoa; it goes for absolute ages, but I can’t complain, because I wasn’t complaining when the sex scene was Tomas with Agathé).

Maybe there was lust there, maybe a bit of anger, maybe relief, I don’t know, A nascent relationship between Martin and a young writer (Erwan Kepoa Falé) ends when Martin thinks Tomas and he could make a go of it again, after Tomas mentions that Agathé is pregnant. The writer tells him he’s sick and weak, and it’s a savage burn even if it’s not delivered with venom, more with sadness.

We have watched many flicks, read many stories where there’s an awful, selfish manipulator as a protagonist or an antagonist, who carefully plays people off of each other, or strikes where people are most vulnerable, out of malice, out of sadism, out of an utter lack of humanity, and occasionally solely for amusement, to alleviate one’s boredom. I don’t think any of that is at all applicable to the Tomas character here. About the only gentle, understanding feeling or idea I can express towards this character is that I don’t think he sets out to hurt people deliberately.

But, fucking hell. This fucker…

I rarely get that annoyed at characters in flicks, but good gods was I angry at this piece of shit.

I saw that this flick had some rave reviews last year, for a flick that pretty much disappeared from the discourse (only to reappear, at least for me, when Richard Brody, famed film critic for The New Yorker, did a Tiktok a while back saying it was one of his favourite flicks of last year), and finally saw it myself.

Its charms are not entirely lost on me, but there’s no way I really got into this the way other viewers did. And I think I have a good handle on where the director is coming from, having really loved a previous film of his being Love is Strange, about an older gay couple, mirroring the plot of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, but with decent performances and characters I cared about, in contrast.

This? Hmm. If it was a sequel in kind to that earlier flick, which it isn’t, and in which it seems to have nothing in common, its title could have been Love is an Excuse People Use to Treat Other People Appallingly. But it’s not even about people acting in certain ways or melodrama or anything like that. Martin and Agathé come across as reasonable, decent people. The people around them seem caring, well-balanced, concerned. Tomas is a horror show. This isn’t a flick about contemporary relationships, or dating, or breakups, or getting back with exes, or how hot it is to have sex with gorgeous women or a gorgeous man whose voice made people swoon when he played an animated bear called Paddington.

This is about a stainless steel pinhead pinball called Tomas who violently pings around in people’s lives until they show him the door. Maybe you can sympathise with him a bit better than I could. Maybe you can feel the aching neediness behind his bullshit, sense the perhaps childhood neglect that has made him so desperate for people’s good opinion of him, or compulsive need for their physical comforting.

For me, though, I was like “fuck this guy” after a few minutes into the film, and my opinion didn’t really improve over the course of the movie. I think I’ve always liked Ben Whishaw in practically everything I’ve ever seen him in, and of course I thought his performance here was perfect for the material. Although I have to admit I was happiest when he was kicking Tomas to the kerb.

Adéle Exarchopoulos maybe doesn’t get to express as much through her character, though she seems to be the only intelligent person in the entire flick, and that’s confirmed very late in the movie during a conversation she and Martin have in a café just before the film ends. She is the only one that makes a smart decision in a one and a half hour film.

It’s well made, the performances are fine, but damn did I loathe that character of Tomas. I’m sure that was partly intentional, and, having read an interview with the director, he felt that people, with a certain amount of maturity, would be able to watch Franz Rogowski’s performance as Tomas, and perhaps sympathise with him rather than condemn him outright.

Maybe I should be a bit ashamed to say “Sorry, Ira, but no fucking way”, and to admit I still have some work to do on myself, but sorry, not sorry, it was not for me.

7 times just get in the bin, Tomas, out of 10

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“I felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time” – it’s called the touch of a good woman, Tomas, it’s not a religious epiphany even if it feels like it - Passages