Passages

A man returns home to his husband after spending the night out. “I had sex with a woman,” he tells his husband. “Can I tell you about it?” The two sentences are a marvel of economy, a subtle reveal of the rules – spoken or otherwise – of their relationship. But there’s mystery tendered here, too: Is the husband really okay with this???

Love is strange. It’s right there in the title of Ira Sachs’ 2014 film about two men whose long and loving partnership is strained after they marry in their 60s, and it’s been a recurring topic of interest in Sachs’ filmography: with the roundelay of adulterers in 2007’s Married Life; in the semi-autobiographical 2012 addiction drama Keep the Lights On, where the heart keeps a man rooted in place, even when the head is screaming to get out; in the fraternal love between two boys in 2016’s Little Men, whose friendship is ruined by the adults in their lives.

In Passages, Sachs’ enthralling eighth feature, he and his regular co-screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias return to the more experimental bent of Keep the Lights On, echoing that film’s elliptical nature and naturalistic presentation of sex, its dizzyingly destructive relationships and Euro-arthouse affect. Impetuous, needy Tomas (Rogowski) is a film director married to the more steady Martin (Whishaw, best known as Bond’s Q). They live in Paris. While celebrating the wrap of his latest film, Tomas meets Agathe (Blue Is the Warmest Color’s Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher, in a bar. When Martin goes home early, Tomas stays to dance with Agathe and eventually goes to her place. The morning after, he makes his confession to Martin, beginning a torturous pattern of bouncing back and forth between his husband and his new lover.

Sachs and his performers are alert to the delicate and wordless ways bodies move toward and away from each other, in overture to sex and sometimes in rejection of it. A not-negligible amount of the film’s running time is spent in beds. Presumably because of that sexual content, the MPA issued the film an NC-17 rating, which Sachs and distributor Mubi rejected, calling the board’s decision “anti-gay, anti-progress, anti-sex” and opting to release the film unrated instead. The scenes of straight sex are not at all explicit; the scenes of lovemaking between Tomas and Martin are revelatory – unadorned, honest-feeling depictions of an intimate and fraught partnership.

Of course, it’s not just sex that happens in bed. In one scene, as Tomas and Martin fight, Sachs films the conversation from behind Tomas, the back of his head obscuring the whole of his husband’s body. Later, a similar framing is applied to Tomas in bed with Agathe, who disappears from view. The metaphor is easy: His presence is so big, he blots out everyone else.

Whether Rogowski is convincing as a man of such magnetism to bring two otherwise sensible people to their knees is, I suspect, a matter of taste. I’ve adored the German actor in films like Transit and In the Aisles, where he’s shown an underdog’s vulnerability. Here, he is the alpha – an agent of chaos, a petulant child. I understand why Sachs and Zacharias centered him, but I wanted so much to burrow more deeply into the inner lives of Martin and Agathe, the more interesting characters, and the more textured performances.