Review | Between, Bewitched, and Bothered on the Sexual Divide

On the list of art films passing through town this summer is the Juliet Binoche–starring Between Two Worlds, coincidentally a title that could be ideally suited to the new Ira Sachs film, Passages. Here, our hapless protagonist Tomas, a German film director in the gap between a film wrap and its premiere, also finds himself torn between two worlds, as a gay man suddenly pulled away from his lover by a tantalizing heterosexual affair.

It opens with Tomas (Franz Rogowski) in command of a film set, which suggests the makings of a film-within-a-film narrative structure in store, but the plot quickly shifts into the director’s real life, a storyline now messy and without the fateful power he wields behind a camera. Tomas’s own passages between poles of sexual identity and romantic fixation are anything but clear or self-awakening. He’s trapped in a “between” zone, which accounts for the steady hum of narrative tension and frustration in the film.

Writer-director Sachs doesn’t shy away from sex, a central obsession and drive train in Passages. In this case, however, the explicit sex scenes seem to be less about erotic intent than an almost scientific display of the differing mechanics of male/female and male/male carnality, as relates to the man in the middle. Meanwhile, though, our own empathy for Tomas wavers along with his disparate lovers.

The strained love triangulations at times remind me of another, more interesting Sachs film, 2005’s Forty Shades of Blue, in which the parties are a rock ‘n’ roll producer, his wife, and his aspiring musician son from an earlier marriage. The emotional dynamics, teetering on the brink of melodrama, but fresh in the plot-devising, have a stronger pull on our attention than the new Sachs model.

Somewhat surprisingly, Passages’ meandering and sometimes distracted musings yield to a strong final act. The last half hour comes together as things fall apart for our confused and self-indulgent protagonist.

Despite the various tendrils of friction within the plot, one of the most memorable scenes has a stark simplicity: As our troubled and now romantically unplugged hero manically rides his bicycle, with the sound of free jazz titan Albert Ayler’s “Spirit Rising” aptly frazzling the soundtrack. The late, great Ayler managed to combine avant-garde impulses and pained emotionality, a paradoxical goal Sach strives for, and almost gets to with his latest.