Passages

This movie's faint appeal as a post-modern take on a love triangle seems exhausted by the implausible image, featured in many promotional cards, of Franz Rogowski's sneering Tomas jazz-snuggling up to Adèle Exarchopoulos' Agathe on a dance floor. Tantalizing, but no, the film does not explain how this pair makes any chemical, emotional, or even symbolic sense. Franz Rogowski has a convincing restraint and charisma as an outsider in films like "In den Gängen" or "Transit," but here, cast in a sexual melodrama (between characters Tomas, Martin, and Agathe) as a self-obsessed bourgeois, he acts as if he were a guy who manages a cable company by day and was hired for this film because of his eyebrows. That said, Rogowski has little in the script to work with: why any character should care about this selfish oaf is head-ache-making opaque. The script tempts Rogowski into an egotistical flatness, his voice a monotonous whine, whose musical equivalent is a beginner's huffing atonally on a saxophone, alone. The character knows no boundaries. Part demon-child, part mindless fungus, he one minute halts ordinary conversations imperiously and the next shows up uninvited (opening doors himself), babbling needy demands in somebody's dwelling or workplace. Aiming for the top edge of the goal, the filmmakers instead deliver Tomas as a kind of compound of all the silly-shirt, night-scene poseurs in the history of Saturday Night Live, going back to Dan Ackroyd's "wild and crazy guy," Bill Hader's Stefon, and the Roxbury Guys of Ferrell and Kattan. However, Tomas's nylon tank and midriff-baring macrame-top collection beats all of these SNL figures in a race to "ridiculous." We are supposed to believe that a woman, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, who recalls Monica Vitti and Anna Karina in her voluptuous elegance, toughness, and vulnerability, is obsessed with a sniveling, narcissistic twit, a dying fire-pit of acrid banalities. Unsurprisingly, after about five minutes of film time, Exarchopoulos resonates an odd fatigue incompatible with Agathe's allegedly incandescent fascination with Tomas, and she betrays a glowing concern that the actress, not the character, is in a bad dream: this movie. Ben Whishaw as Martin is such a maestro that he is the only one of the three (in other work excellent) principal actors who can bring himself fully to the script with a believable, developing, pained realization, but the film at large is so full of abrupt, nonsensical leaps of mood and commitment that the whole exercise could be a workshop in which the players were challenged to vitalize premises that make scant sense. Another film that much more convincingly allows the wonderful Adèle Exarchopoulos to play on a plane of "nothing left to lose" is Rien à foutre (2021).

German film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his British commercial artist husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) have been together for 15 years ...quite an achievement, I'd say, given just how immature, capricious and utterly self-obsessed Tomas routinely shows himself to be. Pretty much the only glue holding them together appears to be the fact that, whatever else may have gone stale between them, the sex is still good.

Although the script never explicitly mentions it, it would appear that theirs is an exclusive marriage: i.e. There are no intimations given to suggest that it's an open relationship, in which permission to "play away" has been agreed - so when, out of the blue, Tomas finds himself intensely attracted to a 20-something female schoolteacher called Agathe - an attraction he pursues with typically impulsive selfishness and no regard for anybody's feelings but his own - the impact on Martin (and, in due course, Agathe) is just as seismic as you'd expect.

Essentially what we have here is a portrait of a narcissist, in thrall to his own impulses, manipulative and duplicitous when it suits his purpose, and incapable of facing up to the consequences of his actions. Tomas is a study in arrested development: emotionally he's barely more than a toddler - a little boy who, on seeing a shiny new toy, must have it, and cannot understand why everybody else can't just go with his flow and let him have his way.

It's a tough challenge to play an unlikeable character and still keep your audience invested in them, but Rogowski pulls it off superbly, showing us that Tomas is as much a victim of his destructive personality traits as is everyone else who falls foul of them. As much as I despised Tomas's behaviour, I couldn't help but find myself feeling sympathy for his damaged soul. In that final night-time bike ride through Paris - having lost, by his own actions, everything of genuine value - he is truly heading nowhere.

Addendum: In the course of this movie I learned a frankly jaw-dropping, thing - that, in the 21st century, French schools have appallingly lax security: apparently any random stranger can get on the premises and barge into a classroom!

"Passages" is a master class in building a film around an unlikable character.

Franz Rogowski gives a commanding performance full of charisma and sex appeal as a sexually fluid narcissist who can't stand to let anyone around him be happy without him (or even really with him, for that matter). Viewed with a live audience, the movie becomes almost something of a comedy, and it was a hoot hearing the people in the theater with me reacting with more and more vocal disbelief at just what a jerk this main character could be. It's a morbidly fascinating character study -- it's almost like watching a day in the life of a sociopath.

I should have been exasperated with this character and movie and probably would have been if it had been handled differently. But as is, with Ira Sachs's excellent direction and the film's terrific acting, it's instead one of the best movies I've seen so far this year.

Grade: A.

Who knows what routes were taken to be you, the entrances and doorways you've passed through, the aisles and the channels, the thoroughfares you've unravelled, the barriers you've broken and forced through. As you begin a fresh departure from your husband, deploying all your tools, with a brand new hand, falling for French girl Agathe, trying on restyled hat, nipping back to make sure flames are truly fanned. As the music stops you look for a new chair, continuing with conflict and despair, like a ball (a pair even) you bounce around, a kind of yo-yo is unwound, until you're snookered and then left, to go nowhere.

"Tomas" (Franz Rogowski) and husband "Martin" (Ben Whishaw) find their marriage severley tested when the former man starts to fall for "Agathe" (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and that passion drives "Martin" into the arms of "Amad" (Erwan Kepoa Falé). What now ensues is, frankly, a rather dull introspective of characters that didn't really leap off the screen at me. Rogowski can be a charismatic actor, but here he offers us a rather unremarkable characterisation of a horny man who wants to have his cake and eat it. Whishaw is, routinely these days on screen, just a bit weedy and presents another weakly constructed individual who seems content not to fight for the man he's supposed to love. It all just rolls along without really catching fire, it's over-scripted and though it may well have a visual authenticity to it, it's all just a bit so what? The production and pacing all contribute to the general ennui of the film and to be honest, I was just a bit disappointed with this whole thing. I saw it at the cinema this week, but I suspect even the most ardent fans of these three can wait for a television screening.