Passages – Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos in Ira Sax’s drama

In Italy for August 17thanks to the spread MUBI AND Lucky Red, Passagesnew drama film Ira Saks (Frankie, love is strange) With Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw AND Adele Exarchopoulosenters the cinema after its transition to SundanceV Berlinale and etc. Sicily Queer Film Festival. The devastating story of love and betrayal is a strong intersection of complex modern relationships, in the center of which the protagonist’s bisexuality is seen as a trigger for the external and internal conflict of the characters.

Passages about love between three people, born in honor of the director Thomas (Franz Rogowski) sleeps with a woman, a teacher Agatha (Adele Exarchopoulos) on the last day of filming in Paris. A man proudly tells his husband about it Martin (Ben Whishaw), with whom he has lived for many years, tells him how being with a woman has been an exciting experience and expresses his desire to delve into it. However, when Martin also starts having an extramarital affair, Thomas will return to turn his attention to her husband. From that moment on, a narcissistic relationship develops between Thomas, Agatha and Martin, full of passion, but also jealousy.

To date, it has been established that cinema, series and literature consist of those “pillow says”, bed chats, are especially popular in recent years – just remember the success of the series Ordinary peopletaken from the novel Sally Rooney who, in his brief but powerful bibliography, explored all aspects of married life, both positive and negative. Passages fits perfectly into this typology of telling unconventional love stories with the protagonists no longer young, but real and trustworthy pissed off and troubled adults. The film is an exposition of internal and external drama Thomasdirector, homosexual (who turns out to be bisexual after meeting a charming teacher Agatha) husband Martin with whom he goes through an obscure marital crisis that pushes the two into infidelity. Thomas is a spectator of his own life, but a director of the lives of others, he moves between two worlds that he would like to make his own at all costs, moving from one bed to another, from one house to another, from one drama to another, without ” a visible goal or a clear idea, a metaphor for the difficulty of falling in love with two people at the same time.

Cinema has always given bisexual characters marginal or non-existent roles, only in recent years have we witnessed more openness towards this sexual orientation, but still too caricatured and poorly presented. Ira Sachs decides to build the story of her film nuvolo around Thomas’ doubts and struggles at one of the most difficult moments of his life, in a context in which society imposes choices but that can never happen. There is no choice, you cannot decide who to love. To support the complex role of the protagonist, Franz Rogowski

the result of a non-random cast, in a complex, multifaceted role in which the actor is able to bring out the emotions and difficulties of his narcissistic, confused character who cannot help but remember Fassbender From Shame.. They circle around the main character, his companions, Martin, her husband, tired of married life, and Agatha herself, a charming teacher who accidentally met in the club, who will plunge Thomas’s life into chaos.

Thomas is at the center of a complicated case – the load-bearing wall of the house. Passageswhere silence, unsaid is worth a thousand words. In a context where everything seems to be chaos, from the costumes of the performers themselves to the soundtrack and the mess in the interiors of houses, adultery is consumed, but so is self-awareness. Sachs chooses three perfect interpreters to dress the characters in his script. On the one hand, Thomas, symbolic, mysterious, extremely strange in poses and clothes, on the other, Martin, far from the homosexual stereotype, and Agatha, an atypical femme fatale, a seducer, not a destroyer.

With a linear script, dramatic dialogue, sometimes ironic and cynical, typical of French cinema, a pure direction that prefers to unfold the action in a house that is considered primarily an intimate, family place, Saxon writes the fate of three real, human, trustworthy characters at a difficult moment, exploring relationships, sex, eroticism and the difficulty of knowing how to identify, in a continuous run of emotions, feelings and situations.

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Passages From Ira Saks comes to the movies August 17 distributed by Lucky Red and Mubi. Here is the movie trailer: