“Passages” and “Lady Killer,” Reviewed

By Anthony Lane

There have always been strange fish floating around on the big screen. Darting to and fro, and obeying behavioral patterns of their own devising, they represent a species unknown to science. The leader of the shoal is Peter Lorre. Other examples include Harpo Marx, his soundless mouth opening and closing like a grouper’s, and Klaus Kinski, a danger to everything else in the tank. Now we have Franz Rogowski, who stars in Ira Sachs’s “Passages.”

You may have noticed Rogowski in Michael Haneke’s “Happy End” (2017) and Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” (2019), or as the leading man in Christian Petzold’s “Transit” (2018) and “Undine” (2021). Last year, in Sebastian Meise’s “Great Freedom,” he played someone imprisoned for homosexuality in postwar Germany. All in all, Rogowski is not a performer to be ignored. Note the pause and lunge of his movements; the chewy lisp of his voice, which gives the impression that, even in mid-rant, he is not so much addressing other people as letting them into his thoughts; and the dark, unsleeping fervor of his stare. It is as if someone were stoking a fire inside his head. As Tomas, the protagonist of “Passages,” he rubs his hands over his scalp at moments of distress, trying to put out the flames.

Tomas is a film director, and the opening scene shows him at work, shooting a sequence in a bar. He doesn’t berate his actors, and yet, during multiple takes, as he issues instructions (“Put your hands in the pockets”) we feel the whetted edge of his impatience. That can’t make life easy for his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw)—a printer by trade, and a peaceable spirit in comparison with Tomas. They have an apartment in Paris and a rural retreat: a comfortable existence, designed to raise the hackles of a natural discomforter like Tomas. Barely has the tale begun when he meets a teacher named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in a bar, dances with her, and then sleeps with her. The next morning, he goes home and says to Martin, “I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?”

It is the starkness of the line that shocks. We sense the brunt of pure selfishness, and behind it an unspoken but immovable credo: “I will do as I wish. I make no concessions, let alone apologies, to you or anyone else.” Tomas is not petty enough to be a mere jerk. He is an id savant, as it were, with appetites exposed—a descendant of the angelic demon in Pasolini’s “Theorem” (1968), who wormed himself into a bourgeois family and ate it from within. Just when we think Tomas has done his worst, he doubles it. Wait for the conversation in which he makes so bold as to suggest that Martin, whom he has cuckolded with abandon, should be happy for him.

After the initial betrayal, everything speeds up. Before we know it, Tomas has moved out of the marital bed and in with Agathe. “Are you going to stay for a long time?” she asks, more in trepidation than in hope. “I can be terribly self-involved,” he says, though you can’t be sure whether he’s warning her or bragging. She introduces him to her parents—an all but unwatchable clash of opposites, with Tomas rolling up late in a sheer black crop top, covered in dragons, that leaves his midriff bare. (Elsewhere, he sports a coat as thick as a bearskin and a loosely woven sweater of poisonous green. Talk about a statement wardrobe.) Not that Martin, for all his mildness, hangs back. He soon gets involved with an imposing writer, Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), and we realize that “Passages,” far from being an elegant love triangle, is more like a quadrilateral of desire. And the shape of it shifts, right up to the bitter end.

In narrative terms, this is familiar territory for Sachs. His 2014 movie, “Love Is Strange,” was about a gay couple, played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who had their own pressures to endure. The result, however, bore a comic gentleness, even a gentility, that is utterly expunged from “Passages.” The emotional weather has changed. The new film is relentlessly interior, unfolding in bedrooms, classrooms, and cafés, with no interest in broader landscapes; all we see of Tomas’s country place on the outside is a corner of the house and a parked car. Time, too, seems to be squeezed. Tomas leaves Martin, returns in fitful ways, then departs again, but how many days or weeks elapse between these decisions I couldn’t say. The dialogue is abrupt and angular: “You can’t tell me what to do”; “I don’t want to talk with you any more”; “I want my life back, and I don’t want you in it.” Hearing this jab of monosyllables is like being poked in the eye.

Here and there, “Passages” has been described as “sexy,” but that’s the last thing it is. To be sure, there are writhings on view, gay and straight, but the sex has the animus of violence: a desperate grapple, with one person’s legs wrapped around another’s back. Agathe keeps her heavy boots on, and almost bangs her head on the edge of a desk. Nothing here is solved or softened by the making of love. Rather, the effect of all the lusting is to hammer people further into unwisdom and despair. It’s the unhappiest film I’ve watched in a long while, steeped in Freudian pessimism—that is to say, you can meet the demands of the libido, in full, but don’t expect your world not to fall apart. Once satisfaction is guaranteed, so is chaos.

Why put yourself through “Passages,” then, if it’s so painful a trip? Largely because of Rogowski. Tomas is a beast, and were he played by an actor of less vehemence he’d be a pain in the neck and nothing more. As it is, he pulls us into the jungle. At the movie’s climax, we find him on all fours, in a school corridor, in a fury of supplication, and then on a bicycle, haring through Paris and paying no heed to the traffic. The camera draws closer to his face as he rides, and we hear—but do not see—what sounds like a street band, raucous and cracked. A similar music rang out sixty years ago, at the end of Fellini’s “8 1/2,” to serenade another film director. But he was a wistful and regretful soul, whereas Tomas is unappeased and mad. He’s on the road to nowhere, and getting there fast.

There is an odd stretch of common ground between “Passages” and “Lady Killer,” which opens at Metrograph on August 4th. In both films, one of the characters is employed at a printing press. In both, too, a guy lies in a bath and soaks, like a tea bag, while chatting to his lover. Each movie explores, with terrible candor, the ease with which people can enter the gravitational pull of a seducer. For my money, the erotic atmosphere of “Lady Killer” is the denser of the two—surprising, perhaps, given that it was made before the Second World War.

The director of “Lady Killer” is Jean Grémillon, a substantial yet elusive presence in French cinema, who died in 1959. Although he was honored with a retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, in 2014, “Lady Killer,” which dates from 1937, has never before been granted a theatrical release in America. The French title is “Gueule d’Amour,” which means “good-looking” or, literally, “love mug.” The mug in question is that of Jean Gabin, who plays a cavalryman named Lucien Bourrache. His regiment is garrisoned in Orange, in the South of France, and heads turn whenever he enters a room. Needless to say, comeuppance awaits. Lucien, encountering the stylish and untethered Madeleine (Mireille Balin), loses his swaggering heart and his cool head. He quits the Army, follows her to Paris, and discovers, having fooled with the affections of so many women, what it’s like to be the toy.

“Lady Killer” reveals Gabin in the early summer of his fame. (In the same year, he appeared in Renoir’s “Grand Illusion.”) What a captivating figure he still cuts: as squarely grounded as Spencer Tracy, though touched with the murmuring modesty that we associate with Gary Cooper. As Lucien, Gabin has to be plausible not only in uniform, sporting pants so wide that they deserve their own palazzo, but also when misfortune blunts his dashing manners of old. “Your talk, your advice, I’ve heard it all, now go!” he barks at Madeleine’s interfering mother. Again, we catch an uncanny echo of “Passages”—“We don’t need your advice,” Tomas says, berating the mother of the mortified Agathe.

Not every rarity is a revelation, but “Lady Killer” strikes me as the real deal. The romantic fatalism of its plot might seem to portend Gabin’s work in Marcel Carné’s “Le Quai des Brumes” (1938) and “Le Jour Se Lève” (1939), yet Carné’s baleful mists hold little appeal for Grémillon. His movie breathes a sharper air. Observe the crisp diagonal shadows that slice across the sunlit squares and sidewalks of Orange. Late in the proceedings, the gaze of the camera slips sideways from the patronne of a café, polishing glasses, to two customers (straight out of Cézanne) at a table, one of them playing a mouth organ, and comes to rest on the inky silhouette of Madeleine, who braces herself for the arrival of Lucien, and thus for the settling of scores: an entire domain of sentiment and custom, at once earthy and mysterious, traversed in a single shot. The chance to savor such grace doesn’t descend too often. Grab it now. ♦