The presumed practice of death and burial of racial passage by light-skinned blacks in the United States decades ago returned to the spotlight in Passage, a delicate, sensitive, intentionally claustrophobic and not entirely agile debut in the direction of the diverse British performer Rebecca Hall. Based on the recently revived 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, which was a modest success in its day, the film is arguably intriguing in that it looks at a very particular convention about which the younger generations know very little. But the adaptation is also quite arched and warmly decorated, with a well-rehearsed rather than spontaneous feeling that sometimes makes things heavier. Still, it is very different from the usual fare both in cinemas and on the tube and, given the subject, will attract curious intellectually and culturally informed.
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The passing phenomenon was known to the general public during the last century due to a handful of popular entertainments, notably the classic musical stage Show Boat and its screen versions, the hugely successful novel by Fannie Hurst Imitation of life, which also spawned two popular film adaptations and the 1949 Elia Kazan drama Pinky, a great success at a time when black customers in many areas of the country were still forced to sit on the porch alone. There was also the 1960 film I passed for white, based on a real life book, and a reversal of the same concept, Black Like Me, a book in 1961 and, four years later, a film about a white writer who darkened his skin to experience living in the South as a black man.
It has been a long time since old friends Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga) met when they met again in New York. “You have changed so much,” Irene couldn’t help commenting, since Clare, who has fairly fair skin, dyed her hair blond and, in the bargain, married visibly the Viking John (Alexander Skarsgard), with a full beard that it wasn’t even remotely in fashion during the crazy twenties. When Irene asks John, “Have you met any black people yet?”, He replies, “No, but I know people who know them.”
Accompanied by a piano soundtrack, the film seems a little stiff at first, with little dramatic vigor. The two old friends talk in an oddly formal way with each other, and the rooms seem quite unoccupied. In living a charade, Clare has tried to make a statement, distance himself from his past and be genuine in order to ascend in society. Appearances are all there, and after a few minutes, some of the extended chat scenes become quite boring in their silly pretense and arrogance. Furthermore, Hall does them no favors for not offering much enthusiasm to the exchanges. For a long time, the film seems almost inert, needing to burst for life.
Part of the “trapped” feeling stems from the shrewd decision to employ the old square 4: 3 ratio. Filmmaker Eduard Grau makes the most of this, as most of the film is filmed in confined spaces, and the way he and Hall artificially compress the world in which the characters live makes the threat of what is outside existentially oppressive.
The focus of the drama remains very narrow all the time, expanding only when Irene and her husband Brian (Andre Holland) move from Chicago to New York forever with their two children and engage in some charity work with Hugh (Bill Camp) , whose acute suspicions about the truth about Irene are born when she issues her most outspoken admission on the subject: “We are all going through one thing or another, aren’t we?”
Hall’s adaptation is carefully constructed, as well as very attentive to the needs of the two central female characters, as they desperately try to keep their little worlds artificially created for themselves. There is evidence of a self-destructive Tennessee Williams heroine in Clare, who creates a fantasy for herself by sculpting a fragile but unsustainable private domain, involving the maintenance of appearances. Psychologically, it is not at all complex, but the film’s variation on a particular type of selflessness is tragic and quite unusual on the screen.
Negga and Thompson are splendid women whose primary impulses lead them to live lies, constructions that take them far – and, in the most drastic case, fatally – than they were born to be. Whatever problems the film may have, it provides a distinct glimpse of how certain things were not so long ago.
Passage made his world debut in the Dramatic Competition USA section. Running time: 98 minutes. Sales agent: Endeavor Content.