Karen Ponzio Photos
Ira Sachs and Brian Meacham in conversation at Yale.
“My husband doesn’t want to dance with me,” filmmaker Tomas says to Agathe, who’s fresh off a breakup with her boyfriend. “I’ll dance with you,” she says. She does. What comes after is a sort of dance between Tomas, Agathe, and Tomas’s husband Martin in Passages, the latest film from acclaimed writer and director Ira Sachs that was screened as part of the Yale Film Archive’s Treasures From the Archive series this past Friday night.
It was another special occasion there for two reasons: One being that the film was shown in 35 mm — the only copy of it in existence, made especially for YFA — and two being that Sachs himself, a 1988 graduate of Yale, would be there for the screening and participating in a Q&A afterward.
Sachs introduced the film after archivist Brian Meacham welcomed everyone and gave a brief introduction himself. He noted that YFA had several new releases shown this semester, though none were in 35 mm.
“We have this one because we wanted it,” he added with a smile. Meacham said he emailed Sachs last year and asked if YFA could have a 35 mm copy made and Sachs agreed. Meacham called him “really wonderful and helpful” about it all, adding that the print “looks beautiful.”
“You’re in for a real treat,” said Meacham.
For those of you, like this reporter, who are interested in how such a thing happens for a film not originally shot on 35 mm, Meacham explained that the film print was made at a film lab in Maryland called Colorlab, using a machine called a Cinevator. This machine creates a positive print from a digital file without the need for a film negative. MUBI, the distribution company that released the film, provided the high-resolution digital file used to make the print. While the digital film is no longer in theaters, it is still available on MUBI’s subscription channel. This 35-mm print will now be a part of the Yale Film Archive in perpetuity.
Fans of the film, as well as those who had never seen the film but were fans of Sachs (like this reporter), filled the lower-level screening room in the Humanities Quadrangle on Friday night to experience the auteur’s latest work in this form.
Sachs immediately expressed his gratitude to Meacham for his interest, noting that he had graduated from Yale 36 years ago as a film theory major in the literature program and was happy to be back. Though he was “sad to hear” that there was no longer a cinema in New Haven, he was glad there was a “robust audience here” for YFA screenings.
“I discovered my love for cinema at Yale,” he said.
The film opens with a scene that sets the tone for the rest of the proceedings as Tomas, a German film director played with larger than life passion and relish by Franz Rogowski, attempts to get a scene for his new film — also called Passages — just right, stopping the proceedings numerous times to redirect one actor’s descent down the stairs and fill another’s empty cup. It’s not a major scene in his movie, but he still demands control over it and expects perfection.
Tomas has demands outside of his work that magnify the highs and lows of an artistic life led in a rather narcissistic fashion. He ends up having sex with the aforementioned Agathe, a French school teacher played with depth and delight by Adele Exarchopoulos, and then running home the next morning to tell his patient yet somewhat exasperated husband Martin, played with grace and poignance by Ben Whishaw.
“This always happens when you finish a film,” Martin says to Tomas. “You just forget.”
But does he? Or is it, as Tomas says, “different this time?” The film follows the three characters as they maneuver through the world in search of what will and won’t work for them as individuals and as couples. (Or a throuple perhaps?) And even as Martin starts a relationship with writer Amad (played by Erwan Kepoa Fale), Tomas cannot seem to let go or at the very least leave them alone. Amad does his best to warn Martin of what may be in store for him if he doesn’t take a stand.
“You’re weak and you’re sick,” Amad says to Martin. “You won’t survive this, either one of you.”
Who will survive? Who will thrive? And will Tomas ever lose his grip on anyone who comes into his orbit?
The film doesn’t offer any easy answers, but like Tomas, it is easy to be attracted to it. Steeped in aesthetics that call to mind that look of the best of the 1970s, the film is all rich textures, saturated color, and sensuality to the nth degree. The sex scenes in the film may be shocking to some, though if anything they are the most natural of their kind in recent memory, all fumbling fingers and awkward poses in the name of a passion that has no bounds. These characters are responding in the moment; whether what they do is a smart move for any of them isn’t important right then and there. The situations they get into can be considered tough to accept but realistic to expect, and yes, even laugh-out-loud funny at times.
Sachs spoke to the crowd afterward about the humor, the aesthetics, and much more, including how the film looked in 35 mm, which Meacham called a “total masterpiece.”
“It feels different,” said Sachs, “it’s hard to describe,” adding that there was “just something physical about the experience” — especially with this audience.
Sachs answers audience questions.
Meacham mentioned how everyone is so “brutally honest” in Passages. Sachs responded by saying that the film reminded him of being in college, which garnered laughs. He noted how it has “a lot of anguish of being in relationships with other people,” and how his early films were “driven by the illicit — what wasn’t said.”
“I used to find secrets pretty exciting,” he said. “I’m repelled by them. I think the film in a way conveys that. Nothing is hidden, but that doesn’t mean you get a free pass. There’s a lot of pain.”
They discussed Sach’s influences, including French cinema, which led to Sachs sharing how as a junior in college he saw 197 movies in a three-month period in France that changed his life. He also got the idea of films being a “series of middles.”
“We are brought into the middle,” he said, noting that there is a story happening before and after film begins and ends. There is ”usually a period of disorientation” in the first 30 minutes of a film, but once the audience “gets put in the middle,” they become oriented. This approach was influenced by cinema verite, as were other parts of the film and Sach’s filmmaking in general.
Meacham asked how Yale influenced his filmmaking.
“In some ways I was trained on the novel,” said Sachs. “I feel like Yale really grounded that because I was a literature major and I was continuing to read in a very serious way. Plot has essentially become something I have internalized.” He added that “questioning male power and male culpability, and seeing myself in that, is something that developed as I was a student here.”
The audience had questions for Sachs — and praise for him and the film as well — including asking him about how he felt hearing the audience laugh so much during the film.
“I’ve kind of decided it’s like watching a Jerry Lewis movie,” he said. “Because you’re watching someone do a lot of things they shouldn’t do, and you’re just closing your eyes and it’s very uncomfortable and it’s nice that there’s a collective experience in the uncomfortability that erupts in laughter.” This also elicited laughter from the audience.
Sachs also mentioned that this was “not a realistic film.” Perhaps it was in a “realistic register,” but at a certain point they chose to go with what was “beautiful and aesthetic,” including the aesthetic of skin and texture and color and light, down to clothes and makeup choices. A crop top worn by Tomas in the film was specifically chosen by Sachs; I expect it will become iconic, with its dragons set against black mesh.
Sachs also talked about how he wrote the film for Tomas’s portrayer, Franz Rogowski, who he saw in another film and thought was “all physicality, all intensity, but intensity that also has originality.”
At one point in the film Tomas is seen riding his bike through the streets of Paris with that intensity, those rich colors and lights bathing him. We don’t know what will happen next, just like in life. Instead of trying to figure it out, perhaps it’s best to stay in and experience that moment, that middle.
The next Yale Film Archive event will be this Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m., when a new print of Vera Chytilova’s Daisies will be shown along with Alexis Krasiklovsky’s End of The Art World. More information about that event as well as future events can be found at the YFA website.