FILM
Passing in More Ways Than One
Film navigates racial identity, lesbian themes
BY STEVE ERICKSON
The opening and closing
shots of “Passing” hint
at a more daring fi lm
than the one Rebecca
Hall, an actor making her directorial
debut, actually made. The fi rst
scene gradually brings a world into
focus. The images are blurry, the
sound muddled. The camera’s POV
is a foot above the sidewalk, looking
at people’s legs as they walk
by. Gradually, the soundtrack gets
louder and clearer. The scene turns
out to be about a woman gazing
at another woman. Irene (Tessa
Thompson) runs into her old friend
Clare (Ruth Negga), and she looks
up from her feet to her face. At the
end, the reverse occurs. The camera
pulls back to a point where snow
blows across the screen so heavily
that it almost blots out the scene.
Irene and Clare, both lightskinned
biracial women, knew
each other as children but fell out
of touch in their teens. Clare now
passes as white, living with a racist
husband (Alexander Skarsgard).
When he meets Irene, he takes her
for white as well, and uses the N
word in front of her. (Both women
laugh, although the underlying
anxiety is palpable.) Neither woman
has to worry about money, but
Irene, whose husband (André Holland)
is a doctor, participates in
early civil rights activism without
recognizing her own colorist attitudes
towards their servant. Irene
and Clare spend more and more
“Passing” hits Netfl ix on November 10.
time together, especially in Harlem
nightclubs.
“Passing” may be a little too good
at capturing the ambience of repression.
Even at its most dramatic,
the tone is fairly quiet. Hall lets
the cinematography speak for her
characters. The fact that the fi lm is
in black and white, and framed in
1.33, alludes to its setting. It also
expresses the story’s ambiguity
in visual terms. Between the extremes
of those two colors, a thousand
variations in between are
displayed. Its symbolic use of color
may be on-the-nose at times, as
when snow represents the power of
whiteness in the fi nal scenes, but
at least Hall lets her images speak
as much as her dialogue.
Based on a 1929 novella by
NETFLIX
Nella Larsen, who was a biracial
woman, “Passing” was made by a
director who has been perceived as
white, indeed a rather posh British
woman. She had to investigate her
heritage for herself as an adult to
learn that her maternal grandfather
was Black. She says, “If I look
at my mother now I can see clearly
that she is of African ancestry, but
that wasn’t clear to me as a child.”
She now sees the political dimension
and psychological pain behind
the passing which occurred
in her family.
Racial passing isn’t the only
kind of closeting that “Passing”
explores. Irene and Clare seem to
have a degree of desire for each
other. When they greet each other
in a restaurant, Clare stares
at Irene till they speak. It plays
as a form of cruising — they may
have a history, but the way the
scene is fi lmed suggests a strong
erotic charge. Their quick return
to friendship, albeit mediated by
the presence of Irene’s husband or
other men, hints at the same, as
do scenes like the one where Irene
tells her husband she’s worried
about her son picking up “queer
ideas” about sex from other boys.
Casting Thompson, whose partner
is Janelle Monae and who rejects
labels but says she’s attracted to
men and women, enhances this
subtext.
Tessa Thompson is made up
and dressed to look glamorous according
to white beauty standards,
with straight blonde hair and a
pearl necklace. “Passing” hints at
the projects of two fi lms by Black
lesbians, Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon
Woman” and Dee Rees’
“Mudbound.” All three attempt to
make up for the erasure of Black
people in classic Hollywood movies.
“The Watermelon Woman” lays
this out explicitly, showing a video
store clerk researching a Black actress
who played servants in the
1930s and 1940s and discovering
a life as a lesbian that contradicted
her submissive onscreen appearance.
“Mudbound,” also made for
Netfl ix, plays like a Black counterpart
to William Wyler’s version of
1940s America in “The Best Years
of Our Lives.” Its style might be
classical, but it speaks from a perspective,
drawing on Rees’ grandparents’
lives, that was shut out of
Hollywood at that time.
Hall’s direction of actors brings
out a mannered rhythm of speech
that recalls 1930s fi lms. She says,
“Part of the concept of this fi lm
was to turn it into the great, female
driven 1930s noir it should
have been if Hollywood studios had
made noirs with Black female leads
in the ‘30s. That was the genesis.
The fantasy of discovering this lost
fi lm that might have existed in a
better world.”
At its worst, “Passing” mistakes
opacity for subtlety. For a fi lm
based on an acclaimed book, its
script is its weakest aspect. The
characters are thinly drawn. In
its fi rst half, “Passing” lays out the
outlines of Irene and Clare’s lives,
especially Irene’s barely acknowledged
dissatisfaction, but the rest
doesn’t do much to fl esh them out.
It’s too reliant on pregnant pauses
and glances. “Passing” touches on
an array of themes without delving
too deeply into any, although
at least it trusts the spectator to
make their own way through deeply
charged territory.
PASSING | Directed by Rebecca
Hall | Netfl ix | Opens at the IFC
Center Oct. 27th
NOVEMBER 4 - NOVEMBER 17, 2 24 021 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
