Listen to the audio version of the article
A very intense ménage à trois: this is how “Passages” can be summed up, the new film by Ira Sachs, the American director known for “Tones of Love” and “Frankie”.
At the center of the story is Tomas, a successful director with great charisma and happily married to Martin for several years.
After shooting his new film, Tomas meets by chance a young teacher, Agathe, with whom an irrepressible passion breaks out. The man even decides to leave her husband for her, but ends up going back on her steps when he discovers that Martin has also started an extramarital affair.
Presented in world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and then at the Berlinale in the Panorama section, “Passages” is the most successful film to date in the career of Ira Sachs, a director who started making films in the 1990s and who had demonstrated a fair amount of talent only occasionally. The American director stages a sentimental triangle in which passions, moral blackmail, betrayals and guilt are mixed: all three protagonists are well developed in the writing phase, just as the entire narrative trend is credible. The character of Tomas is certainly the one Sachs focuses on the most, making him stratified, complex and even ambiguous in his way of expressing feelings, towards others and towards himself.
“Passages” and the other films of the week
Photogallery4 foto
View
Extraordinary Franz Rogowski
Sachs only occasionally falls into some excessively mannerist and slightly studied passages, but they are isolated sequences within an overall design that is functional and captivating at the right point. There is no lack of references to the cinema of the past (to Maurice Pialat, to example) but, despite the fact that the general theme has already been widely covered, “Passages” manages to be original and exciting, thanks also to the brilliant dialogues that are established between the three main characters. It is a film that manages to make itself felt under the skin, without of rhythm along the entire duration, with a growth of the emotional climax as the minutes go by.