You can find hundreds of egotistical monsters who’ve graced movie screens (don’t get us started on the ones working behind the scenes; that’s a whole other piece), but few of them can compare to Tomas Freiburg. A renowned filmmaker who’s a tyrant on set — his volatile Rainer Werner Fassbinder vibe is strong, and he will scream at an extra to walk down stairs and swing his hands the exact right way until He. Gets. What. He. Wants! — Tomas is a genuine terror when it comes to his personal relationships. Just because he’s married doesn’t mean he won’t impulsively have sex with someone he met at a club. Just because he loves his longtime partner doesn’t mean he won’t leave him. Just because his new sweetheart is nurturing and kind doesn’t mean he won’t betray her, too. Just because someone else has emotional needs doesn’t mean he will acknowledge them, because what about his needs? Just because someone says finally says “I’m done” doesn’t mean he won’t beg for forgiveness, he’s changed, this time it’s for real, he just needs that 1000th second chance.
Tomas is the black hole at the center of writer-director Ira Sachs’ Passages, a force that pulls everyone into an orbit from which no light can escape and love only runs one way. He’s an antihero who requires a carefully calibrated combo of skin-deep charm and bone-deep toxicity. So thank god that Sachs recruited Franz Rogowski, the German actor who’s graced the single-shot heist movie Victoria (2015) and arthouse hits like Transit (2018), to play him as a charismatic box of bonbons with a biohazard sticker slapped on top. Thanks to Rogowski, you completely get the magnetism of someone like Tomas; he can make listening feel like flirting, and turn something as simple as biking down the streets of Paris into the equivalent of a guitar solo. And you understand why, when he shows up at your door dressed in a sheer black sweater, striped stovepipe pants, a fuzzy coat, and some sort of floral scarf, you’d feel the urge to let this smart-dressed guy with the puppy-dog eyes in. (The description of the above outfit doesn’t do it justice; credit costume designer Khadija Zeggaï’s rhapsody of bohemian couture for making this a movie of character-building through extraordinary fits.)
But Freiburg is also bad news, an angle which Rogowski isn’t afraid to lean equally hard on, and he’s the reason that Passages is not just the bleakest of romantic comedies (or possibly the breeziest of romantic tragedies) but a true portrait of an artist as a self-centered narcissistic prick. Celebrating at the wrap party with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), Tomas asks him to dance. His weary spouse demurs. Agathe (Blue Is the Warmest Color‘s Adèle Exarchopoulos), however, is happy to hit the club floor with him. She’s hanging with some friends but recognizes the filmmaker, introduces herself, and the two eventually end up at her place. The next morning, Tomas bikes home, bursts through the door, and tells his angry husband, “I had sex with a woman!” He then seems highly confused as to why Martin doesn’t want to hear all about it. Why can’t he simply be happy for him?
After Tomas runs into Agathe again — and they heatedly get it on again — he moves out of his place and into her apartment. “Are you going to stay for a long time?” she asks, mildly surprised. “Of course, very long!” he replies. There’s still the matter of the country house that he and Martin own, however, and the fact that Martin wants to sell it so he can move on. Tomas uses that as a pretense to not cut things off; he also knows that it makes for a convenient excuse to show up back at the old place anytime he wants, probably unannounced, possibly in the middle of the night. And if he also flies into jealous rages when Martin starts dating someone else, well, that’s his right. But he still needs Agathe to cater to his emotional neediness as well. “I can be terribly self-involved,” Tomas admits. This is the understatement of the century.
An indie-film veteran who’s no stranger to turning the spotlight on dysfunctional relationships and/or showcasing raw, explicit sex scenes (see: Keep the Lights On, the 2012 drama that provides a great example of his facility with both), Sachs is determined to make you follow this gorgeous parasite until the very end. You don’t need to like him. But you’re going to stick with him through every whining plea, every casually cruel remark and every bad-impulse decision that ends in what appears to be great sex. The sequences in which Rogowski respectively, but equally vigorously screws and gets screwed were enough to get Passages labeled with an NC-17, and one in particular would rate high on just about any cinematic how-hot-is-too-hot? ranked list.
Just because a few are graphic doesn’t mean any of them are gratuitous, which is why the MPAA rating rankles a little bit. Once upon a time — i.e., “the 1970s” — it was possible to use sex in movies about adults in a way that differentiated them from “adult movies.” It’s not a huge leap to suggest that Sachs and his cowriter Mauricio Zacharias, along with his absolutely bang-on cast, are harkening back to that hazy heyday a little bit, when such carnal knowledge gave you insight into characters or denoted the emotional messiness that connected and drove them. The movie even looks like it was shot on prefaded Last Tango in Paris film stock.
Besides, Passages isn’t about sex. It’s about being an artist, and the way that gives someone license to become selfish and horrible and assume, rightly or wrongly, that the world revolves around you. We don’t know how talented Tomas is as a filmmaker, though people want to take pictures with him and a major festival accepts his work. But it almost doesn’t matter. Creativity can give the world great art, and it can also leave a lot collateral damage in its wake. You could make the same movie with Tomas being the world’s solipsistic plumber, I guess, yet the fact that he’s a film director tells you a lot. He’s someone who’s used to controlling an environment and getting what he wants. Everybody else are just players to be moved around the stage.
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