This was the summer that we, as a culture, went back to the movies. Most of us saw one or both portions of ‘Barbenheimer’ back in July, but the cinema was still busy last Saturday when I attended Passages, the must-see queer film of our current late-summer heat.
Ira Sachs’s sleek melodrama is an old-school arthouse flick, showcasing fashions and furnishings that are every bit as chic as its pan-European cast of German, French and British actors. The film’s buzzing box office has surely been boosted by coverage of its frank sex scenes and controversial NC-17 rating in the States. Yes, you could catch it at home once it ends up on MUBI, but isn’t this the perfect picture to watch in a dark room full of strangers?
There aren’t many other places where you can share a frisson in polite company at the sight of Ben Wishaw’s butthole. In fact, though, Passages plays on other pleasures of collective watching that go beyond the sexual.
Witnessing Wishaw get fingered is nothing compared to the extremes of emotional fuckery that he and Adèle Exarchopoulos are subjected to by Franz Rogowski’s Tomas. Sachs’s off-kilter camera framing emphasises intimacy and a sense of voyeurism, but it’s the consistently codependent behavior that may make the characters feel uncomfortably close to some of us in the crowd.
For all its cinephile sophistication, Passages traffics in the kind of immediate emotional response associated with soap opera and will have many viewers debating the characters’ choices as if they were real people:
He did not just do that.
Girl, what were you thinking????
In this manipulative ménage à trois, Ben and Adèle put up with more bullshit than it seems like any sensible person would realistically tolerate . And yet, as the audience gasps and groans at Tomas’s latest dickish move, one senses that many of us have more or less been there IRL.
I certainly have. And also with Ben Wishaw.
I haven’t seen anyone else point out that Wishaw has starred in an earlier story with exactly the same premise: a man in a long-term gay relationship begins an affair with a woman and then can’t make up his mind as he plays the two lovers off of each other.
Fourteen years (and three relationships) ago, Mike Bartlett’s Cock was the first play I saw at the Royal Court as a playwriting student newly arrived in London.
In it, Wishaw plays the opposite point in the love triangle to his put-upon husband in Passages. That time around — although still wispy and soft-spoken in a very Wishaw way — it was his character John who broke away from the male partner, seeking something different and setting off all the conflict that follows.
The play was assigned for our MA cohort to attend in November 2009. My then-boyfriend, with whom I’d just moved across the Atlantic from New York, tagged along out of interest in Ben Wishaw. Watching James Macdonald’s forensically sharp production, played out with the audience fully lit in the tiny confines of the Theatre Upstairs, I remember two thoughts racing through my head:
1) who is this actor playing the other boyfriend?? {Answer: it was Andrew Scott, years before Fleabag, and I still haven’t got over it.}
2) I HATE THIS PLAY.
During the bows, I was shaking with agitation and found myself circling Sloane Square for what felt like an hour afterward, debating the play’s dramaturgy. In class the following week, I thoroughly denounced the script, saying how absurd it was that any character would put up with that kind of treatment from his partner.
My tutor, channeling Ester Perel before I’d ever even heard of her, posited that perhaps my strong response indicated just how spot-on the script actually was???
Of course, it was not Mike Bartlett’s writing that upset me — it was the mirror being held up to my real-life relationship.
During our Sloane Square post-show circling, my boyfriend repeated how much he could relate to Wishaw’s portrayal of a character whose solipsistic passivity and indecision masks a deep disregard for others’ emotions.
I, on the other hand, was just as apoplectic as Andrew Scott’s outraged partner:
Always, unfortunately John, for me, always.
And I hope you realise what that means.
That means that I will always be unhappy because I have a feeling that as long as we’re together you will always do this to me, you will let me down, stand me up, cheat and lie and fail and cock things up like this, and then you’ll wonder why I tease you why I’m always going at you, being sarcastic well it’s the only way.
Meanwhile, I’m sure that speeches like this one of John’s hit my boyfriend with a similar sense of identification:
I mean he always made me feel like I used to be, as I was when we met, and you know we met when I was twenty-one, twenty-two really young, and I was always the younger one and he wanted me to stay like that and it’s only now that I’ve realized, I’m a completely different person, and acting like that like twenty-two was making me so depressed
Sometimes, the emotional accuracy of an artwork hits us in such a way that it bypasses all critical faculties and goes straight for the amygdala. We can no longer be discerning viewers because we are so filled with rage or pain or grief. We become Don Quixote attacking the puppet show as if it were real.
I’ll never be able to reasonably assess Terms of Endearment because my brain has hard-wired a connection between that 1983 film and the death of my own mother a couple of years before, when I was two years old. It’s not even the whole movie that affects me (sorry, Shirley MacLaine) but the Debra Winger plotline, and primarily the one scene where she’s in the hospital speaking in a plain, matter of fact manner to her two children and saying goodbye.
The older boy storms out of the room but the smaller one stays, nodding to to his mother like a little adult as he holds back his tears.
That scene, in all its tearjerking Hollywood cliché, has filled a space in my actual emotional experience I was too young to consciously remember. Whenever I go back and watch it, I am that boy. I had the film on VHS and sometimes I’d just fast-forward to that scene to access the tears that I once held back.
Watching Passages last Saturday didn’t prompt a particularly visceral reaction from me, although it did for some: discussing the film on Slate’s Culture Gabfest, critic Laura Miller confessed to such a strong aversion for Rogowski’s Tomas that she had to stop watching the film multiple times rather than keep looking at him.
Were there other audience members with me at the Curzon Soho cinema who felt as tiggered by Tomas’s toxic behavior as I’d been years ago by Cock?
Sachs’s film is explicit in ways that Bartlett’s theatrical version of the same scenario is not — and I don’t just mean sexually.
The copulation in Sachs’s film is absolutely integral to its meaning: Rogowski and Wishaw’s most extended sex scene occurs after the male couple has officially broken up. With the pleasure of risk now reignited in their dynamic, Tomas can’t leave his wounded partner well enough alone and returns to their bed, using his body as a lure to circumvent Wishaw’s self-protective instincts.
Bartlett’s script, on the other hand, contains zero stage directions and states that it should be presented without set pieces, props or even mimed action. Therefore, when Wishaw’s John and his female lover consummate their sexual relationship, the actual mechanics of their physical actions are left up to the audience’s imagination:
W: Okay okay okay. Yes. Yes.
Right. That’s.
That’s really
Up
Isn’t it?
JOHN: What were you expecting?
W: I mean you’re getting into this aren’t you?
Onstage, Bartlett’s characters use words alone to persuade, entice, skewer and wound. Sachs’s move through a very visual world. His central gay couple are both image-makers (on film and on paper), their costumes colorfully expressive and their apartment cluttered with objects and artwork.
But Sachs’s characterization of Tomas is also explicit: his toxicity is telegraphed to us from the very first scene, which has nothing to do with relationship drama. On the set of his film, he bullies and exposes his actors. He will soon turn domestic scenes into versions of that film set, directing attention to himself at the centre.
Upon first viewing, Tomas’s relentlessly bad behavior felt like a limitation of the film. There’s little gray area in our sympathies as we watch him callously abuse first Wishaw’s Martin and then Exarchoupolos’s Agathe, love-bombing them, then turning cold, returning to offer sex when he’s newly excited, then humiliating them all over again. With a destructive force like this driving it, Passages has the compelling but blunt watchability of a grisly traffic accident.
In Cock, Bartlett makes a different choice. John’s two lovers, denoted in the script by their only by their genders as M and W, are by far the more forceful personalities. His passivity comes across on the surface as helplessness and yet his continual indecision inflicts pain of its own. As a viewer, it’s possible (when not clouded by real-life relationship bias!) to see each of the three characters and their use and abuse of power through subtly different lenses.
Did I respond so reactively to Cock all those years ago because my own behavior, reflected in Andrew Scott’s wounded snarkiness, was equally being held up for scrutiny?
Since that night at the Royal Court, I’ve now been the Taurus portion of more than one Taurus-Gemini relationship (I know, I know…) and would like to think I’ve learned a thing or two.
Perhaps that hard-won emotional distance explains my cooler take upon leaving Passages. My response upon leaving the cinema was primarily one of wariness, a resistance to being too drawn in by the film’s beautiful surfaces and soap operatic highs and lows, just as its naive lovers had lost their senses when Tomas bombarded them with his charismatic chaos.
As the days passed, a subtler appreciation of the movie wheedled its way into my brain. Unlike Cock, which presents three characters jockeying for position, Passages is a study in one man’s manipulations. The other two are collateral damage. We begin and end the film with Tomas: although he demands control as a film director, we learn to detect just how much his insecurity drives him.
Note how he responds to new people and situations: when his husband wants to go home from the club, he possessively seizes upon Agathe as first a dancing and then a sexual partner. He tries a similar move later when he finds Martin getting on well in a bar with attractive novelist Amad (the stunning and soulful Erwan Kepoa Falé). Tomas thrusts himself into their conversation, trying to claim the new relationship as his own; once rebuffed, he immediately sours on Amad and dismisses his writing out of hand. If he can’t dominate a situation through charm, he does so by sabotaging it, as when he shows up late and inappropriately dressed for an important meeting with Agathe’s parents. Like an infant in the Lacanian mirror stage, who’s just discovered his own image, every situation must be de facto about himself.
It’s telling that Tomas’s comeuppance finds him crumpled on the floor of the elementary school where Agathe works. Dressed in a tuxedo like a successful artist off to a big film premiere in Venice, his posture reflects the internal emotions of a child used to being coddled and forgiven for his bad behavior. But not this time.
An earlier, autobiographical movie of Sachs’s, Keep the Lights On, offered a numbing, cyclical depiction of chemical dependency and the unconscious enabling of addiction by romantic partners. Passages examines similar patterns.
On a fundamental level, Tomas is fueled by the cortisol of chaos; when sexual satisfaction is ultimately denied him, he gets it through frantic, risky cycling on the streets of Paris. The stimulation of emotional extremes blunts whatever pain he would like to ignore. He’ll do anything to get the next hit.
The plot of Passages ends with a rupture that satisfies the audience’s need for accountability: no one should be able to get away with that.
Bartlett’s play ends more unsettlingly. With the original domestic arrangement seemingly restored, John’s male partner seeks confirmation and closure:
M: Before you come in can you bring the cushions and make sure the lights are off?
Yes?
John?
John?
You fucking prick I’ll go I’ll go but I just need a yes from you.
Cushions and lights.
Yes?
One little word. One little word and I’ll.
Come on say it.
Say it.
Yes.
Say it.
Say it.
Theoretically, we enjoy artworks that reflects our emotions because they allow us to re-experience them safely. In actual fact, though, the comforts they offer can be of a very complicated kind.
We return to certain works in the same way we return to certain relationships: in the darkened cinema or bedroom, we’re drawn to repeat and relive the past — but each time we bring with us both new and old versions of ourselves.
Eventually, we trust, the lights will come back up.