Sundance: Rookie director Hall goes behind the camera to adapt Nella Larsen’s seminal novel, with beautiful and provocative results.
In the mid-1920s, budding writer Nella Larsen decided to join the ranks of the rising “New Negro” writers from the Harlem Renaissance, such as Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and their leader and mentor Alain Locke. The Chicago native even moved from New Jersey to Harlem to better position herself – and her husband, pioneering physicist Elmer Imes – within cultural action. Although Larsen has not yet enjoyed the full recognition of his contemporaries, she has produced two notable novels that continue to captivate readers. The best known of the pair is “Passing”, a complex examination of race and sexuality against the background of the same Harlem of the 1920s that Larsen wanted to be a part of.
The book, like its predecessor “Quick sand”, is covered with selected details of Larsen’s own life, including his experiences as a mixed-race woman in an age of high racial division. It is a business card and in the capable hands of debuting director Rebecca Hall, “Passing” becomes a seminal feature film, as beautiful, forceful and full of us as the romance that inspired it. Like Larsen, Hall comes from a mixed past, and his own experiences with racial presentation and expectation help to root a complicated story that resists any presumptuous or heavy upheaval.
Filmed in luminous black and white by cinematographer Eduard Grau (a choice that, given the material, may sound cryptic, but it is not), Hall also opted for a boxed 4: 3 ratio, all to enhance the film’s constant tension and the feeling that their characters cannot escape the confines of their lives. Hall cleared some of the most complicated plot points in the book, defining it almost entirely in Harlem (there is no flashback from Chicago here) and eliminating a handful of characters to better focus on its central stars, Irene “Rene” Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry Bellew (Ruth Negga).
When the movie starts, a restrained Irene sails through a hot summer day in New York, sticking her face inside her hat so, well, maybe not hide exactly, but at least obscure. She is so careful that even two white women who accidentally drop a “pickaninny” doll at her feet do not hesitate when Irene, a black woman, returns it to them. The question of whether they don’t realize their racial identity or don’t care about it remains, especially as Irene continues her tasks with the same measure of concealment. Stopping at a luxury hotel known for its airy rooftop cafe, Irene is disconcerted by the look of a white woman sitting across from her. What, she seems to think, does she see?
Thompson, the rare actress who feels at home on Marvel’s grand estates – your Valkryie rides a bloody winged horse into battle and makes it look natural – as she is in more restrained period pieces, she plays Irene as a natural observer. She looks at everything, and Hall does too, going through the airy cafe, taking notes of everyone and, most importantly, what they may be thinking when they look at Irene. No one is looking more difficult than Clare, however.
Childhood friends who have not seen each other in almost a decade, Irene is shocked to realize that the white woman who looks at her is not at all white; it is Clare who is biracial, as is Irene. Although different audiences bring different levels of understanding to “Passing”, Hall does not confuse what happens among women, trusting that people will understand long before Clare explains her current state during the long visit. Clare did something that shocked Irene – or isn’t it? – to the core of it: she’s posing as white. She married a white man (Alexander Skarsgsard, uncomfortable as racist and sexist John Bellew), gave birth to a son who is even clearer than Clare, and barely returned to Harlem from his youth.
But seeing Irene illuminates something in Clare, and Negga’s effervescent performance deftly masks the turbulent confusion growing within her. As happy as Clare says she has her life, her instant obsession with Irene – and his subsequent insertion into almost every aspect of his life – gives a hint of how desperate she is to share the terrible secret she has kept for so long. Thompson’s nerves are on edge, and while Negga initially steals the spotlight with his bigger and bolder performance, Thompson gradually turns into something scorching. Hall made many good choices for his debut – his entire craft department transformed it into rich elements of period production – but the cast of your calls may be the best in the group.
Understandably, Irene can’t shake the interaction, and when a letter comes from Clare, filled with flowery language that makes Irene’s husband, Brian (Andre Holland) laugh, she can’t ignore the effect her old friend had on her . Much like Larsen’s novel, Hall’s “Passing” teems with a homoerotic subtext that eventually gives way to jealousy and ruin. Both Clare and Irene are biracial, and each made a definite choice as to the portion of their racial makeup that defines them and the world in which they choose to live. – is it possible that something similar is happening to your sexual identities? Can we just choose who we are? And what about the pieces of us that we try to reject?
Nobody to be rejected, Clare – whom Negga interprets as irrepressible in every sense of the word – appears at the Redfields’ home in Harlem and essentially begs to be admitted to their lives. Spending time in Harlem, even though most people think she is white, frees Clare to enjoy the things she has long excluded from her life, even though constant Irene reminds her of the danger in her possible exposure. Oh, but Clare is so hard to resist. Irene’s husband and dear children also fall, in various ways, under Clare’s dominion, and the fabric of Clare and Irene’s lives seems completely and unsettlingly complete.
“Passing” asks who is allowed in certain spaces (and who is the porter of those spaces), and what happens when people are ejected from them, either by their own will or by an outside force. How do you get back inside? Can you, really? And what is the price of these infractions? While Clare’s secret wears out Irene’s nerves and her own sense of identity, “Passing” and Hall reject ready-made responses. Larsen’s novel followed an equally harsh tonal line, expanding the drama without giving a sense of relief. Even when a definitive conclusion is reached, the tension and questions do not stop. How can they? Larsen never set out to give answers; just rich stories in search of real experiences – precisely what Hall translated to the big screen for his first formidable presentation.
Grade A-
“Passing” debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival in the US Dramatic Competition section. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.
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