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Tomas, the protagonist of Ira Sachs’s new drama, “Passages,” is a German movie director. His films are never shown, but Sachs leaves us in little doubt that they are good. “Passages” opens with Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) on a set, directing an alluringly flamboyant bar scene on the last day of a shoot. He’s discerning and demanding, giving an actor piquant direction on the gestures to use and psychology to convey when walking down some stairs to join the festivities. But, to me, what guarantees the fictional Tomas’s artistry isn’t what we see of him working. Rather, it’s the way that he lives, the dialogue and the action that Sachs gives him, and the way that, in Rogowski’s impulsive, bladelike performance, Tomas carries himself. With Tomas, Sachs has created a fictional character who’s no alter ego but an ideal of sorts: he embodies the freedom of thought and action on which the very notion of art is based.
The messy and complicated reality that results from living such an ideal gives the movie, written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, its power. Tomas, who lives in Paris with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), a British printer, may be exemplary, but he’s certainly no saint. On the contrary, the plot is driven by the romantic turmoil that he heedlessly unleashes. Tomas is not the type to paper over differences in order to sustain an unstable unity. He’s casually frank and indifferent to the conflicts he provokes—and when the fault lines in relationships appear, he doesn’t retreat but, rather, leaps into abysses of his own creation.
Those fault lines are on view from the start, with hints of trouble cropping up during an after-party celebrating the end of the shoot. Martin is there but unenthusiastic—too tired, he says, from a day’s work to want to dance with Tomas. A young woman at the party, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher, is there with her partner, who worked on the film, but she doesn’t want to go home with him and, amid the churn of the party, doesn’t want to explain why. So, as Tomas and Agathe drift apart from their partners, they drift toward each other and dance together.
A dance scene is a touchstone of directorial style, and the one that Sachs crafts for the party is both free and precise—a breathless whirl of kinetic delight and an erotic sequence that unfolds its narrative implications with spontaneous grace. The night ends with Tomas and Agathe sleeping together, and Tomas, the next morning, confesses to Martin in a way that’s both ingenuously candid and disingenuously cheerful. He says that he had sex with a woman and is impatient to tell Martin about it. He enthuses about the experience, describing it as “exciting” and “something different,” and fully expects Martin to be selflessly happy for him. Martin is far from delighted, of course, but he isn’t entirely shocked—he knows that Tomas is always somewhat unhinged after a film shoot—and figures that the storm will pass. He’s wrong: Tomas both continues his sexual relationship with Agathe and decides that he’s in love with her. He leaves Martin, packs his bags, divvies up the couple’s books, and moves in with her.
Yet Tomas isn’t quite ready to end his physically passionate relationship with Martin, and, for a little while, they and Agathe form not exactly a throuple but something more like an obtuse angle: the two sides, Agathe and Martin, connect only through their common point of intersection, Tomas, the vertex. Amid these complications, Tomas proves to be a spontaneous provocateur, producing further epicycles of enmity and turmoil. Though living with Agathe, he displays little eagerness to meet her friends; when the first screening of his new film goes poorly, he drops in on Martin at work and expects a sympathetic ear; invited to meet Agathe’s parents at their apartment, he shows up late, responds caustically to their traditional parental inquisitiveness, and leaves Agathe appalled by his verbal aggression; he has loud sex with Martin within easy earshot of Agathe; he bursts in on Agathe’s classroom in order to instigate a lovers’ scene of desperate persuasion in the hallway; he tearfully begs Martin not to leave him.
Tomas turns out to be a sort of detonator of the emotional realm, who shatters the unchallenged core of settled lives and unleashes the energy that’s stored up there. The lives include those of people in his orbit of affinity—his partners, friends, and collaborators—but, above all, his own. Partly for this reason—and because of his vulnerability in the face of sudden and drastic changes—there’s something innocently pacific and constructive about the furies that emerge from Tomas’s guileless candor and impulsive ardor. The positivity of “Passages” is inseparable from its sex positivity. There are sex scenes of a rare dramatic power, whether in the animal athleticism that marks the erotic bond of Martin and Tomas (Sachs films their scenes in long, tense, extended takes), in the howling delight that Tomas finds in his relationship with Agathe, or in his tender and wonderstruck gaze at her face as he caresses her to orgasm.
Nonetheless, “Passages” is filled with pain. (Agathe, who’s the least experienced of the group, gets the worst of it, but she also draws most deeply on unfathomed reserves of strength to contend with the unfathomed extremes of Tomas’s world.) But pain that emerges in the course of the action is not inflicted, not the product of cruelty, wrath, or hatred, not the result of abuse or force; it reflects the vitality and the emotional truth that give rise to it. Tomas bears the power of sublime pugnacity, and what emerges from the conflicts that he provokes is drama. He sparks a world of stories and a flood of emotions wherever he goes. Tomas is, in effect, the living cinema; by the sheer force of his character and the nature of his temperament, life around him is set in passionate motion and transformed into the matter of his movies. Although Sachs never shows the film that Tomas is making, we can see on the slate used by Tomas’s cinematographer that its title is also “Passages.”
In the absence of any film-within-a film ploys, the art that dominates the film and most sticks in the viewer’s memory is the music that the characters listen to and generate. Tomas plays Agathe a remarkable record of Janet Penfold singing “Won’t You Buy My Sweet Blooming Lavender?”; Agathe sings for him a nineteenth-century song that her father taught her, “Le Temps des Cerises”; at a country house that Martin and Tomas share, their friend Clément (William Nadylam), a literary agent, accompanies himself on piano as he sings Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s “A Perfect Day.” Alongside all this diegetic music, integrated into the texture of the drama, there is one glorious needle drop, planted by Sachs on the soundtrack at a climactic moment of the action, that serves as the movie’s aesthetic center. The track that Sachs uses does more than just inflect the sequence with its surprisingly extravagant expressivity. The scene, of Tomas’s exalted response to the turbulence of his life—he bikes fast through Paris, in a series of onrushing, exhilarating, increasingly intimate tracking shots—is accompanied by a classic of modern music, a fragment of the title track of Albert Ayler’s 1965 live album, “Spirits Rejoice.”
The music is a wild yet wry burst of free jazz (which also incorporates a fragment of “La Marseillaise”), and it serves not just as a mood-adjusting adornment but as a severe test of viewers’ sensibility. Those who hear it as formlessly vehement chaos have, in effect, passed priggish judgment not just on Ayler and his band but on Tomas, on Sachs, and on the realm of emotional and sexual freedom that “Passages” explores. That realm is more than a personal prerogative. It is the crucible of imagination, the hallmark of progressive politics, and the essence of art. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
