To date, love was a matter of two. At least in its most conservative meaning, which is also the Platonic one. Already in the myth of the androgyne, as it is referred to in The banquet, the philosopher imagined an original race of beings so proud, arrogant and narcissistic that they ended up angering the gods. These beings were round, with four arms, four legs, two faces on their heads and, of course, two sexual organs. They were enough and exceeded with himself and his mechanism. And so until the divinity on duty decided to split them in the middle, condemning them from that precise moment to boldly search for their half. And, of course, with love. Who was going to tell us that it was all just a matter of bad surgery.
Well then, Ira Sachs, director of Love is Strange (2014) y Verano not Brooklyn (2016) and always so concerned about the mechanism that sews us together and unstitches each other, now proposes a complete refutation of Plato. Passages tells the story of a couple made up of the characters they give life to Ben Whishaw and a superb Franz Rogowski to which one good day the one who cheers comes across Adèle Exarchopoulos. It is not a story of bisexuality or even that of a homosexual on the hunt for new experiences. It is, strictly speaking, a story of love, sex, jealousy, revenge, narcissism and confusion, much confusion.
Rogowski is a film director who in the heat of the night meets a young woman in a nightclub. They lie down When he comes home, he tells his partner. It is not a question of deceiving anyone but, quite the contrary, of making the one you love participate in the grace of a new love. Actually, the purpose of Sachs is none other than to be coherent both with his characters and with his story and even with himself. There is no reason to distrust love (much less sex) if it is precisely only thanks to it that the most precious asset is accessed: mutual trust.
And so, applying logic in a somewhat far-fetched way, the director manages to compose a highly intelligent drama so precise at every step that he is cruel in every certainty he discusses. It is a film that strips the viewer’s gaze until they blush. The camera chases the bodies and bristles with them, gets irritated, enjoys and destroys itself. We want to be like the characters when they are happy and perfect, and we barely recognize ourselves in them when they are rude and vulgar. The result is a film as free as it is heterodox, as brilliant as it is uncomfortable. In short, a treatise on love transformed into the most acid and exquisite of concoctions. Goodbye Plato. Love is no longer a matter of two, but of two thousand.