Passages (2023): Desire Without Apology

The Story

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a film director, married to Martin (Ben Whishaw), at a wrap party for his latest film when he meets Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). He sleeps with her that night. He tells Martin. The film is not about whether Tomas and Martin will survive this — it is about what desire does when it is followed, what it costs the people in its path, what it reveals about the person who is following it.

Tomas is not a good man in any conventional sense. He is selfish, impulsive, convinced of the primacy of his own feeling at any given moment. He is also, in Rogowski's hands, genuinely compelling — the kind of person whose energy makes them both magnetic and dangerous, who generates heat that other people find themselves drawn toward before they understand what they are approaching.

Franz Rogowski

Rogowski is one of the most physically expressive actors working in European cinema — every performance he gives is primarily a performance of the body, of a person fully inhabiting their physical reality and the space it occupies. His Tomas moves through the film's Parisian world with the loose confidence of someone who has never seriously considered that his desires might be inconvenient to others. The entitlement is complete and, in the film's moral calculus, completely without malice — Tomas is not cruel. He simply does not think in the terms that would make cruelty visible to him.

The explicit scene — Tomas and Agathe, shot with a directness that the NC-17 confirms — establishes something that European cinema is more comfortable establishing than American: that desire is physical before it is anything else, that what is happening between these bodies is not symbolic but literal, and that taking it seriously requires showing it.

Ben Whishaw

Martin is the film's most sympathetic character and, in some ways, its most interesting performance challenge: a man of genuine feeling, genuine dignity, who is in love with someone who cannot fully reciprocate and cannot fully leave. Whishaw plays him without self-pity — Martin is not the wronged innocent, he is a man who made a choice about who to love and is living inside the consequences of that choice.

The scene in which Martin finally arrives at his own form of anger — quiet, precise, devastating — is the film's emotional apex, and Whishaw delivers it with the controlled force of someone who has been holding something very carefully for a very long time.

Paris

Sachs shoots Paris not as the romantic city of postcard convention but as a working city — cafes and streets and the specific quality of Parisian light that is beautiful without being soft, the city as context rather than backdrop. The film does not use Paris to beautify what is happening. It uses it as the neutral container for behaviour that the film refuses to judge.

The apartment Martin and Tomas share — the apartment that was theirs and becomes contested space — is the film's real location. Its rooms, the way the characters move through them as their relationship changes, is the film's most sustained visual element.

The Moral Refusal

Passages is a film that will not tell you how to feel about Tomas. This is its most distinctive quality and the one that produces the most discomfort in viewers who want cinema to organise their moral responses for them.

Sachs presents Tomas clearly — his selfishness, his desire, his genuine moments of feeling, his eventual choice — and declines to adjudicate. The film is not on Martin's side, though it understands Martin. It is not on Tomas's side, though it inhabits Tomas completely. It is on the side of showing you what people do and trusting you to feel what that means.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is built on the conviction that gay desire deserves to be shown honestly — not softened, not apologised for, not made more comfortable than it actually is. *Passages* is the most recent film on this list and the most uncompromising in its application of that conviction.

The NC-17 is a badge of honour here. A film that shows gay desire honestly enough to receive that rating, and refuses to cut what the rating is for, is a film that has decided the honesty is worth more than the distribution.

It is. It always is.