In less than 90 minutes, Ira Sachs creates a dizzying treatise on the forms of love. “Passages” comes out in theaters on March 8.

A filmmaker married to a man unexpectedly falls in love with a woman, thus setting in motion a double love catastrophe. Paraphrasing film critic Serge Daney, we could say that Passages, the latest effort by Ira Sachs, is not La Maman et la Putain, but fifty years later, it is one of the films that resembles it the most. A sort of Jean Eustache for our times, shorter, less grandiose, but seemingly born from the same dirty vein that aimed directly at the core of adult desires, devoid of any virtue. Nothing is further from these stories about the degenerate avatars of love than the idea of a romantic film: love, here, is a battlefield on which you find yourself unwillingly employed and where you are forced to leave your skin. How can one resist? Reason is powerless: moved by impulse, not causality, the film plunges headlong into this abyss, indifferent to consequences. Any other option is a form of cowardice.

In fact, the film is an anti-La Maman et la Putain: not only because it updates the relationships between the characters, taking them off the immutable path of a man tormenting a woman, and then another, in favor of a far more volatile mapping of the sexes; but also because, in its almost minimalist vein, it reduces the old deluge of blaming and recriminations to a raw, sketch-like experience: rabid infatuation, animalistic sex, wounds, ruptures, guilt galore – a few passages from the all too-known, ever-destructive drama of beings who refuse to mature into an existence of sentimental convenience, preferring instead to go mad with grief.

Paraphrasing film critic Serge Daney, we could say that Passages, the latest effort by Ira Sachs, is not La Maman et la Putain, but fifty years later, it is one of the films that resembles it the most.

For its first few minutes, Passages floats aimlessly: something between a Fassbinder on self-destruction and a Pialat on the necessity of violent clashes with others. A long-time admirer of European cinema, Sachs lands in Paris chasing this generation of existentially jaded millennials who find the concept of clearing their minds more repugnant than anything else. Has there ever been a more Franco-French film – more undeniably well-versed in Parisian passion – that came from abroad, from “overseas” to be precise? Between a retro bike ride and a bohemian apartment interior, the film has plenty of time to open wide the windows of the soul, venturing beyond the polite facades of its characters to uncover unsuspected abysses. It’s only there that Sachs seems to find his voice – having seemingly watched every film Philippe Garrel has made in the last 15 years and coming to the following conclusion: scenes without fat, without filler, only the lean flesh of amorous atrocity, grafted onto a slender, almost schematic structure, everything happening in no time, never allowing us to get used to the stability of feelings. Here, everything is unstable, fixed in blurry pictures that give a rough idea of the depth of the suffering.

Compared to Garrel, Sachs’ momentary advantage is that he sexualizes less, managing at the same time to stay on the edge between compassion (each of the characters has a “deserving” heart) and cruelty (none escapes without a burn). In the midst is not only Tomas (Franz Rogowski), this filmmaker with impulsive urges and a pathological fear of being alone after having consumed everything in his path, but also those he draws into the whirlwind of his toxic passion: Martin (Ben Whishaw), his gallant husband, and Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the woman (somewhat left adrift by the script) whom, for a while, he believes he loves.

To reveal more would mean giving spoilers – but, on the other hand, what happens here seems so inevitable, so maneuvered by the relentless wheels of fate, that the film gives the feeling that things simply can’t go differently. Not so much predictable as free from illusion. This necessity is part of the beauty of Passages: everything happens quickly and disastrously, in small sequences that announce the shipwreck without being able to prevent it. Sachs makes a film genuinely willing to forgo any deadweight in favor of a nakedness of feeling. From outburst to outburst, the mise-en-scène flaunts an almost brutal directness, which knows only the highest intensities: ecstasy, sickness, and all the other states we pass through when under the spell of an out-of-control desire.

At one point, Agathe’s parents – a couple of ossified bourgeois – question Tomas about his orientation, provoking a violent reaction. A sign that the film knows all too well that these issues cannot be translated outside the circle of people it has drawn into the vortex: any stranger is an intruder, a breach of frivolity in this bubble of maximal tonalities. There is a superb scene in which Agathe, worn out after the whirlwind romance with Tomas, finds with her last resources the dignity of an absolute queen: she knows that the man is a notorious coward, but she has the power – in front of her partner, who is unaware – to turn the other cheek. Between egocentrism and self-abandonment, the film advances along the hypersensitive chord of the psyche, reaching a form of incandescence of cinema reduced to the essential: that sovereign, inexplicable truth of the heart that turns people into unconscious beasts, prey to the darkest extremes.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.