On the list of art films passing through town this summer is the Juliet Binoche–starring Between Two Worlds, coincidentally a title that could be ideally suited to the new Ira Sachs film, Passages. Here, our hapless protagonist Tomas, a German film director in the gap between a film wrap and its premiere, also finds himself torn between two worlds, as a gay man suddenly pulled away from his lover by a tantalizing heterosexual affair.
It opens with Tomas (Franz Rogowski) in command of a film set, which suggests the makings of a film-within-a-film narrative structure in store, but the plot quickly shifts into the director’s real life, a storyline now messy and without the fateful power he wields behind a camera. Tomas’s own passages between poles of sexual identity and romantic fixation are anything but clear or self-awakening. He’s trapped in a “between” zone, which accounts for the steady hum of narrative tension and frustration in the film.
Writer-director Sachs doesn’t shy away from sex, a central obsession and drive train in Passages. In this case, however, the explicit sex scenes seem to be less about erotic intent than an almost scientific display of the differing mechanics of male/female and male/male carnality, as relates to the man in the middle. Meanwhile, though, our own empathy for Tomas wavers along with his disparate lovers.