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The action in “The Pass” unfolds in a picturesque community on Long Island’s North Fork.
The man in the water is already clearly uncomfortable when another man, standing on the shore, asks, “You out here alone?” “No,” the first man responds, unconvincingly. The man on land lets an uneasy silence build between them.
Stretches of quiet dominate much of “The Pass,” a new short film by Pepi Ginsberg. But the nature of the quiet—what it means to the characters, and how it feels for the viewer—shifts palpably during the fifteen-minute running time, an achievement that suggests why “The Pass” was selected to make its début at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The action in “The Pass” unfolds in another beach town, a picturesque community on Long Island’s North Fork. It’s Labor Day, and the film opens with Ben, the solitary protagonist, who is visiting the town on his own, talking with a trio of locals outside an ice-cream shop. The strangers are friendly, and extend an offer to take Ben to the beach, which he sidesteps. After biking to a seemingly deserted spot on the water—he’s trespassing—Ben endures the interaction with the menacing stranger, who shifts between awkward sociability and unaccountable belligerence. “I’m not a fucking gay,” he volunteers at one point, out of the blue.
“The Pass,” which also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and at queer-film festivals around the world, never explicitly outs Ben. But the character’s reticence suggests some sort of internal struggle, even before he’s unnerved by the incident at the beach. “Experiences, more than words, were what Ben needed for transformation,” Ginsberg, who completed N.Y.U.’s graduate film program in 2022, said. In many of Ben’s interactions, she told me, “the loudest thing is actually the thing that’s not being said.”
The inclusion of “The Pass” at two of the world’s top film festivals served as a surprising coda for the project, which was initially shut down, two days away from shooting, in the summer of 2020, because of issues related to COVID testing. Almost exactly a year later, Ginsberg was able to reconstitute most of the original cast and crew. In the interim, she had given birth to her first child and rewritten the end of the script. The film’s dramatic centerpiece—the tense conversation while Ben is wading at the beach—was inspired by a real-life encounter shared by Melanie Akoka, the director of photography. “This was such a powerful image and so psychological,” Ginsberg said. In the reimagined scene, Ben emerges from the water subtly changed, his casual swim suddenly an unexpected baptism.
The film treats Ben with gentleness and humanity, and Ginsberg told me she hopes that that attitude will be mirrored more widely, particularly by people like the man on the shore. Intolerance and intimidation are corrosive not only to the victims, she said, but—whether they realize it or not—“even to those who perpetuate them.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
