Out Director Ira Sachs’ New ‘Passages’ Examines Love Triangle

thegavoice.com:

With his new project, “Passages,” out director Ira Sachs wanted to make a film of pleasure and intimacy. “During the pandemic, particularly, I felt a lack of both, so I focused on a love triangle because I felt like the stakes were raised in that situation in a way that made for pure cinema,” he said.

Said triangle involves Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a queer director married to Martin (Ben Whishaw)) and Agathe, a young schoolteacher played by “Blue is the Warmest Color’s” Adèle Exarchopoulos, with whom he begins an affair. “Passages” premiered successfully at Sundance this year and is now in theaters.

Tomas and Martin are not in a good place as the film opens. “In a way, it’s a film that starts at the bottom and goes down from there,” he said. “They are at a point where everything is stuck, and everything is broke but there is still this passion for each other.

And so there is an inability to achieve resolution. That is what keeps the film hopping.” When Sachs wrote the film, he thought it would be about sexual identity and a change in one’s label. “But the film we made is much more contemporary than that, and I think partially because the three actors and the three characters are of a different generation where the labels don’t work,” he said. “Things are changing for Tomas, but gender doesn’t seem to be the central reason why.