It would be a tad 19th century to identify the key disrupter in Ira Sachs’s savage new film as an evil human being. Better to recall F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous description of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby as “careless people”. Played with swallowed relish by Franz Rogowski, Tomas certainly, like those characters, smashes up “things and creatures” as he clatters between blameless partners. He doesn’t exactly retreat “back into ... money”. Tomas’s privilege is differently dangerous. There is a sense here of the way charisma and sex appeal can offer licence to, yes, the most careless behaviour. He’s awful. But you can’t take your eyes off him.
Sachs, director of less dangerously charged dramas such as Love Is Strange and Frankie, begins by offering the cheekiest of answers to an unasked question. What might such a person do for a living? Well, he might get by as a filmmaker. We are on the set of a movie called Passages, where the director is barking commands at a plainly terrified cast. At the wrap party, Tomas meets up with his amiable husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), who is plainly less at home with public swagger. Martin doesn’t want to dance, but Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) does, and, some time after she and Tomas swivel on the dance floor, they swivel more intimately in private.
To this point we might take Tomas for nothing more reprehensible than an awkward rogue, but a conversation with Martin quickly confirms his lack of empathy. “I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?” he says bluntly. It’s not clear if they have an open relationship. If not, then he’s plainly being nakedly brutish. If so, he is disregarding the entry-level sensitivity that any such arrangement requires.
Anyway, what follows is an economic picking apart of a doomed ménage à trois. Passages has already attracted some publicity by being given an almost unheard of NC-17 certificate in the United States for its sexually explicit sequences. Sachs does indeed allow the drama to expand partly through physical congress – one source of Tomas’s power – but the emotional violence will be more shocking to most grown-ups. (The Irish Film Classification Office applied a mere 16 certificate here, the same it gave the foul-mouthed doggie comedy Strays.)
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There is not an abundance of plot. Sachs is more concerned with encouraging his actors to flesh out the dark planet Tomas and its two captured moons. All three excel. Rogowski captures the painful certainty of a man who sees no reason to listen to others questioning his solutions to life’s apparently facile dilemmas. This is at its plainest during an excruciating – and blackly funny – lunch with Agathe’s straight-arrow parents. “What are your intentions towards our daughter?” they don’t exactly ask. But the conversation is close enough to bring out the considerable worst in Tomas.
Exarchopoulos, who has stayed the ground since her breakthrough in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, wears the unsure look of a robust person who suspects she’s giving into uncustomary weakness. The film manages the tricky business of, in only a few scenes, setting up a sort of survivors’ group solidarity between her and the civilised, reasonable, crushed Martin. Only a very few actors could get across as much complicated sadness as Whishaw manages in their last scene together. He remains a marvel.
What emerges is a torrid, gripping drama that acknowledges not just what damage the careless can wreak but also to what extent the responsible often conspire in their own annihilation. The closing excerpt from Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice LP might be the year’s best music cue: anguished, hectoring, unresolved. Just like Sachs’s film.
Passages opens in cinemas on Friday, September 1st
