passages (w&d ira sachs; w. arlette langmann, mauricio zacharias)

Passages confirms the adage that there is nothing better than a good villain and nothing worse than a bad villain. The film revolves around the supposedly charismatic Tomas, played with an ugly charm by Franz Rogowski, married to Ben Whishaw’s Martin, who has a fling with Adèle Exarchopoulos’s Agathe at the wrap party of his film, (Tomas is a film director, natch), which then turns into something more serious and then doesn’t as the maverick charismatic egoist decides he really prefers banging Ben to Adèle. The actor’s prominence is because this is an actors’ movie, where they get to fuck a lot, argue quite a bit and look like movie stars, even if Whishaw does a sterling job of trying to underplay his role, in contrast to the melodramatic material he is given to handle. There’s more than a hint of Cassavetes about their menage a trois, (and the closing shot of Tomas), only this is an alt-bourgeois version of Cassavetes which inhabits a twee Paris, where everyone has a nice apartment with lots of books. The slender spine of the narrative (“Agathe is pregnant”… “Didn’t Tomas tell you, I had an abortion”…) struggles to hold up these ambitions and the various ‘full-on’ sex scenes seem to compensate for the lack of real dramatic action elsewhere. Nothing is particularly credible. Tomas has been living in Paris for a decade, but can’t be arsed to learn French, so most of the movie is in English, his film apparently is about to screen in Venice at the end, but he drifts through the whole process doing nothing more than sometimes popping into the edit suite, and Agathe, it turns out half way through, is actually a homely teacher. The most coherent line in Passages is the way it confirms Paris as the go-to city for cinematic romantic liaisons. There is, por supuesto, a strong tradition of this, from Godard to Linklater, but there has been a spate of films in this vein of late, (Denis’ Avec Amour and Audiard’s 13 Arrondissement). However, at the end of the day, in spite of the actors’ endeavours, what scuppers Passages is the fact that Tomas is more whiney teenager than Rimbaud or Verlaine.