Sexy Love Triangle Drama ‘Passages’ Gets NC-17 Rating, Director Slams Decision as ‘Cultural Censorship That’s Quite Dangerous’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ira Sachs’ sexy Sundance drama “Passages” has received an NC-17 rating by the MPA but will be released unrated by MUBI, the distributor confirms to Variety.

MUBI called the rating “unexpected” and said it was “deeply disappointed by the MPA’s decision.” “MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating,” the distributor added. “MUBI remains committed to releasing ‘Passages’ nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut.” “Passages” centers on a love triangle in Paris between a movie director (Franz Rogowski), his artist husband (Ben Whishaw) and a grade-school teacher (Adèle Exarchapoulos, no stranger to NC-17 controversies as the star of “Blue Is the Warmest Color”) he meets out one night.

The film includes several sex scenes in which the actors are fully nude, but none of them are salacious or gratuitous. One scene centers on the husbands having sex and is shot in an unbroken long take that runs just over two minutes. “There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” Ira Sachs told the Los Angeles Times in an interview about the film’s NC-17 rating. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives.

And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.” “To make an interesting sex scene is not easy,” Sachs continued. “Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film.