Passages

 

Ira Sachs' psychological drama Passages is only in the loosest sense about a "love triangle" because the three principals -- Tomas, Martin and Agathe -- are not actually in love. It would be more accurate to say they are in love with notions, and not necessarily romantic ones. They are a mess, individually and collectively.

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a self-indulgent German filmmaker living in Paris with his patient and enabling husband, Englishman Martin (Ben Whishaw), when they meet a young French woman Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at a night club. Tomas, apparently bored with the predictability of his life with Martin, goes to bed with Agathe for no reason other than he wanted to.

Martin takes the news of Tomas's encounter with Agathe with an equanimity that Whishaw plays with such weary acceptance that it must be his character's usual response to his husband's flights and attention-seeking.

For her part, Agathe, a school teacher, breaks up with her boyfriend in the first minutes of the film with a curt dismissal that would be imperious coming from an older woman, but with the 20-something Parisian, it seems just callow and wounding.

It's not clear why Tomas and Martin are still together considering how indifferent Tomas is toward Martin's existence, except in the ways it affirms his own.

And it's hard to pity Martin for being in an increasingly toxic relationship with Tomas; the source of his spiritual weakness is a mystery. The trio's damage is confounding but seems rooted in sexual expressiveness, which Sachs stages in lengthy scenes among the principals.

While its story is a bit sour and distancing, Passages is refreshing in that it doesn't try to salvage its characters from their bad choices. That's not to say Tomas, Martin and Agathe are not better off by the end of the picture but it does leave open what their next chapters will be like and if they will be substantially different from what we have just witnessed.