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Passages

Directed by Ira Sachs

2023

France

91 minutes

Unclassified 18+

Book Tickets

Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, SFF 2014) returns with this sexy Sundance/Berlinale highlight about a thorny ménage à trois. Featuring knockout performances from Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Rogowski plays a charismatic, self-involved film director, Tomas, who leaps back and forth between the Parisian apartments of artist husband Martin (Whishaw) and school teacher Agathe (Exarchopoulos). It all unravels when a disinterested Martin leaves Tomas’s movie wrap party early, and Tomas hits it off with the younger Agathe on the dancefloor – which continues to the bedroom. Prideful and oblivious, Tomas immediately confesses his affair, triggering an ever-teetering love triangle. Sachs’s and Mauricio Zacharias’s bitterly funny script is a whirlwind of raunch, revelations and relapses, exploring the trappings of indulging the impulsiveness of a narcissist.

The movie is built on the specifics of sexual pleasure—with whom, in what way, how strong—and Sachs develops these scenes with emotional modulations that arise from the actors’ passionate performances.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

The raw and resonant Passages is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Instead of serving up a playlist of all the obvious high-drama scenes we think we want… [Sachs is] just as likely to portray the quiet, in-between moments, planting clues that allude to arguments and arrangements that occurred when the cameras weren’t eavesdropping, but which intelligent audiences can infer.

Peter Debruge, Variety