92 min | NR | August 4, 2023 | Mubi
Tomas finishes a film, sleeps with a woman at the wrap party, and tells his husband about it the next morning like he is reporting the weather. Then he decides he wants both of them. Passages watches a charming man burn through everyone who loves him and call it freedom.
Tomas is a film director finishing a shoot in Paris. He is married to Martin, a printmaker. At a wrap party Tomas sleeps with Agathe, a schoolteacher, and announces it to his husband the next morning without apology. Passages is not a love triangle. It is a portrait of a man who treats other people as material to be used and discarded. Ira Sachs builds the film around Tomas’s appetite and refuses to soften it.
Franz Rogowski plays Tomas as a coil of need and entitlement. He moves through every room as if it belongs to him. Rogowski makes the character magnetic without making him sympathetic, which is the harder trick. Ben Whishaw plays Martin with a quiet that hardens into resolve over the course of the film. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays Agathe with warmth and a slow recognition of what she has agreed to. The three actors build a geometry of want in which every gesture registers as either invitation or wound.
Ira Sachs directs from a script he wrote with Mauricio Zacharias. The camera stays close and patient, holding on faces long after the dialogue stops. The sex scenes are explicit and unhurried, staged as negotiations of power rather than spectacle. Tomas’s wardrobe does narrative work, the cropped tops and sheer fabrics announcing a man performing his own liberation. The editing lets scenes run until the discomfort becomes the subject. Sachs trusts silence and stillness to carry the cruelty.
This is a study of a narcissist rendered without commentary and without punishment. Sachs declines to explain Tomas and declines to redeem him. The film watches him damage the two people who love him and offers no verdict beyond the damage. Passages works because it never mistakes charisma for virtue. It lets you feel Tomas’s pull and then makes you sit in the wreckage.