In a pre-release review from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, critic Alissa Wilkinson (Vox) went to the heart of the many complicated contradictions at work in Ira Sachs’ Passages: “It’s an extremely European film from the American director Ira Sachs, full of homages to classics of European cinema, and a portrait of a rascal and the helplessness of the human heart.” The “rascal” here is Tomas (Franz Rugowski, A Hidden Life), a magnetic if narcissistic charmer, married to the steady, far less flashy Martin (Ben Whishaw, The Personal History of David Copperfield) whose many virtues are not enough to keep Tomas from sleeping with Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulis, Blue is the Warmest Color), a schoolteacher he meets at a party. Yes, it’s a triangle of emotion, eroticism, and extremes, and Sachs (Love Is Strange) never shies from the sparks in this powerful drama. In witness to that, the MPA slapped Passages with an NC-17 rating for its explicit sexual scenes, a rating Passages turned down, so it is being released unrated. But Sachs has changed nothing.

In English and in French with English subtitles.

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