Sundance London 2023: Passages

Originally published 08/07/23 on Letterboxd

Wrote about the film more extensively here, but what this viewing months after Berlin has solidified is that unlike most of the ephemeral festival-circuit pastel-hued queer dramas that the film’s co-opting by MUBI has lent itself to seemingly being part of, it is nonetheless at an assuredly distant remove from any of its contemporaries. Much of this rests within the fact that this is a delightfully bitter, nasty film that abandons any arbitrary signifiers of “healthy relationships” (boring!), and instead chooses to stage a slow, almost venereal decay in Rogowski and Whishaw’s characters’ relationships (both of whom are at the height of their powers here).

In that respect, I’ve also come to find Rogowski’s repellent awfulness in this a source of deeply-felt identification, not unlike Blanchett’s similarly icy performance as another egotistical artiste in TÁR last year- an emotionally vacant, somewhat evil man with a lisp, an affinity for mesh tops and a monstrous ego is very important Representation™ for me, personally.