The first thing we see in “Passages” is uncertainty masked by confidence.
Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a filmmaker on the set of his most recent film – a staid sort of period drama, the scene in question set in a smoky bar as a man walks down the stairs to join a room filled with patrons who are posed just so. Throughout the sequence, Tomas frequently cuts, playacting at the role of director more so than he actually follows through on that role. “Just walk down a staircase, it’s not that hard,” he snidely remarks to an actor, just moments after giving that same actor a number of very particular notes about how, exactly, one should walk down a staircase. Tomas has a casual bluntness to his tone as he directs, working to create the image of someone who knows what he’s after without actually seeming to understand what that is.
Over the course of “Passages,” writer/director Ira Sachs (along with co-writer Mauricio Zacharias) explores Tomas’ inability to decide what exactly it is he wants and the disastrous consequences that lack of direction has on not just his own life, but the lives of those he finds himself romantically involved with. After years of marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw), Tomas has become restless and bored with his partner. When Martin leaves a party early one night, Tomas impulsively begins an affair with a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) that sends the inadvertent throuple into turmoil.
At the center of this love triangle is Tomas – a black hole of a romantic partner who cuts an infuriatingly impressive figure in a crop top. He offers the type of romance that is all-consuming, the type of intimacy where you can’t see how lost you’re becoming in the other person until it’s too late. Sachs’ interest in exploring the physical manifestation of that dynamic between these three characters comes alive through meticulous blocking and a camera unafraid to hold still while its actors do the work. Through the art of sensuality, “Passages” shows us how easy it is to lose ourselves in toxicity of our own making.
“Passages” would not work as well as it does without Rogowki’s alluring performance at its center. Rogowski comes from a dancing background, and he gives Tomas a flexibility that lets him move through the film like a snake, physically maneuvering himself into whatever form necessary. But that bodily expressiveness is a double-edged sword. Tomas’ face is ever-enigmatic, but whatever his face hides, his posture reveals. The camera often captures him from behind, and his back – whether it be taut with tension, seductively sinewy, or slumped in defeat – gives away more about his state of mind than anything else about him.
The way Sachs positions Tomas in opposition to his partners uses that revealing physicality to show how each character loses themself in this relationship. In one scene, Martin slinks out of a truly remarkable red robe (just one of a plethora of dynamite, character-driven costumes from costume designer Khadija Zeggaï) and climbs fully nude into bed with Tomas, who ignores this deliberate act of seduction with his back turned. After Martin flips around to go to bed, the scene abruptly cuts to an argument the couple are having later that night. Both men are sitting up in bed, Tomas in the foreground and Martin behind him, slightly out of focus and almost completely obfuscated by his partner’s body. Then, Tomas pivots slightly so his back takes up the majority of the frame, Martin all but disappearing behind his girth.
This is what Tomas does – he subsumes people, falling headfirst into relationships so fast that everyone involved is unable to see where they end and the other begins. “You say that a lot, I imagine,” Agathe responds when Tomas says that he is falling in love with her – a joke, but one tinged with suspicion. An earlier scene has shown us just how easily Agathe cuts off romantic entanglements, but Tomas’ all-encompassing nature barrels through her walls with ease. As her guard falls, Martin is trying desperately to build his up again after years of emotional warfare. While they’re on different sides of the Tomas experience, Exarchopoulos and Whishaw play their characters with a similar, yet opposing, sort of delicate vulnerability. In the main scene they share together, the turmoil Tomas has wrought plays across their faces in different ways – Agathe resigned, masking her sadness from the world, while Martin trembles with the weight of his own.
Just as he overtakes Martin, Tomas takes center stage in his quieter moments with Agathe as well, her sitting slightly behind him in the frame or her face half hidden behind his arm as they lay together. But as much as Tomas wants to overpower his partner, the power dynamic shifts during the film’s sex scenes as he tries to lose himself in Martin and Agathe, tries to grasp onto something that he can’t quite name. In the main love scene between Martin and Tomas, we barely see Tomas at all, the camera trained on the emotion and strain in Martin’s physicality instead of his partner’s. In most of Agathe and Tomas’s scenes, she is on top, taking hold of a position of power.
The power that Tomas cedes in his sexual relationships contrasts starkly with how much he takes from his partners emotionally, a sort of confused push and pull that Sachs has outlined for us from that very first scene. “Passages” presents a portrait of a man who is lost in his own orbit, who does not know what it is that he wants – and it’s impossible to ask for what you need when you cannot name it.