Old Friends, Unsettling Revelations
Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” — A Film Review
In 1920s New York, a young woman slips into a dining room at a hotel. It’s a beautifully relaxing space: sunlight, plants, drapes. But every gentle scrape of chairs and whispered murmur echoes harshly in her ears. This is Irene, our protagonist. She is a light-skinned black woman “passing” in a white space, and her nerves are shot.
We learn later that this is the only time in Irene’s life that she’s tried this. By chance, she reencounters Clare, who has apparently spent the years since their high school passing as white. Up in Clare’s hotel room, Irene meets Clare’s white husband, John. It’s clear immediately that not only does John not know of Clare’s blackness, he’s unabashedly racist. Believing himself to be among two white women, he happily spews insults. The scene is a masterclass of tension and intimate drama. Irene horrified into nervous laughter, Clare silently imploring, both women utterly aware of the shattering power their secrets hold over each other.
Passing, based on Nella Larson’s 1929 novel of the same name, tells the story of the relationship reawakened by this meeting. Irene returns to her family in Harlem, disturbed. But she’s not the only one unnerved by this meeting, and Clare shows up on Irene’s doorstep. Their meeting gave Clare a glimpse into a life she had learned how to live without, and Clare is distraught. Irene reluctantly invites Clare to a party, and with Clare’s reentrance into Irene’s slice of black society, a new friendship is wrought.
Clare is daring and charismatic. Irene is responsible. The first blush of their reacquaintance has moments of girlish intimacy, colored with their shared experience of motherhood and nostalgia. But Clare’s deepening intrusion into Irene’s social world stirs up questions Irene would prefer to remain unasked. Is Clare having an affair with her husband? Is Irene really as kind and motherly and content as Clare says? It’s in these early scenes that the film’s themes are articulated most directly.
“We are all passing for one thing or another, aren’t we?” Irene observes. “I’m beginning to believe that no one is ever completely happy, free, or safe.”
But intellectual musings of these contradictions differ from action required to resolve them, and Irene is passive, while Clare, increasingly bold in her Harlem adventures, seems recklessly uninterested in interrogating the consequences.
These themes haunt the film nonetheless, even if, as their lives further intertwine and tensions mount, the two women stop speaking about them. The two lead actors perform these intricacies beautifully: Tessa Thompson is wonderfully restrained as Irene, subtly conveying a thousand anxieties and repressed thoughts. Ruth Negga is a real star. She plays Clare with a wide-eyed luminosity, her presence both serene and magnetic.
This is a film set mostly in small locations: autumn-swept doorsteps, inviting living rooms, jazz bars. The graceful piano score by Devonté Hynes helps set the scenes, but it is largely the actors who occupy the spaces and deliver the drama. André Holland, as Irene’s husband Brian, is another charming standout.
This is Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, one she’s campaigned for over a decade to fund. It’s difficult enough to make a period film about black women based on a little-read novel in today’s commercial landscape. To do so as a first-time feature director firm in her clarity of vision requires even more determination.
Hall insisted from the start that the film be shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, in black and white. Yet these choices come across not as pretentious artifice or cheap metaphor, but fold seamlessly into the themes of the film itself. The arbitrary racial categories investigated by the story are harder to discern on a monochrome palette. And most things in this black-and-white film are shades of grays, framed in this unfamiliar forced ratio, as difficult to categorize as the moral inclinations of its characters. It’s also just stunning. Shot and framed with aching tenderness by Eduard Grau, a distinctive beauty emerges: there are dappled shades of light and shadow, a luminosity and texture to even colorless worlds.
In the increasingly divergent commercial and arthouse categories of film today, Passing leans clearly towards the latter. It’s not purposefully opaque, nor is it like the near silent films of certain Cannes darlings, for which one must sit so still in the cinema that they absorb artistry through their very pores. But it’s a subtle, soft-spoken film that requires attention and a certain emotional investment, even as the film’s style sometimes holds characters at a distance. If you’re not in the mood to admire the minutiae of facial expressions and file away dialogue moments for later resonance, perhaps this isn’t the film to watch on your Friday night.
If you are in the mood for a little cinematic introspection, though, let Passing be your guide. The film asks urgent questions through character study: What are the fictions we tell ourselves, in order to survive? And how will we react when life comes along to puncture those lies?
