Sundance: Director Hall, for the first time, goes behind the camera to adapt Nella Larsen’s major novel, with beautiful and challenging results.
In the mid-1920s, budding writer Nella Larsen drew her attention to the emergence of the emerging “New Negro” writers escaping the Harlem Renaissance such as Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and their leader and mentor Alain Locke. The Chicago resident even moved from New Jersey to Harlem to better position herself – and her husband, the pioneering physicist Elmer Imes – at the heart of the cultural action. Although Larsen has not yet enjoyed the full recognition of her contemporaries, she has produced two remarkable novels that still enchant readers. The best known of the pair is ‘Passing’, a complex investigation into race and sexuality against the backdrop of the same Harlem from the 1920s where Larsen so desperately wanted to be.
The book, like its predecessor “Quicksand”, is interspersed with details deleted from Larsen’s own life, including her experiences as a mixed race woman in a time of heightened racial divisions. It’s a card work, and in the capable hands of director Rebecca Hall, ‘Passing’ becomes a similar film, just as beautiful and fragile and confusing as the novel that inspired it. Like Larsen, Hall comes from a mixed background, and her own experiences with racial presentation and expectation help to root out a complicated story that resists all humble or heavy-handed twists.
Hall was shot in the black-and-white light by film painter Eduard Grau (a choice that, given the material, may sound sonorous and is not), and Hall also opted for a built-in 4: 3 aspect ratio , the better the the constant tension of the film and the feeling that its characters can not escape the boundaries of life. Hall scraped away some of the more intricate plot of the book, placing it almost entirely in Harlem (there is no flashback of Chicago here) and doing away with a handful of characters to better the central star, Irene “Rene” Redfield Tessa Thompson, to focus). ) and Clare Kendry Bellew (Ruth Negga).
As the movie begins, a restrained Irene navigates her way through a sweltering summer day in New York and puts her face in her hat, all the better to, well, maybe not hide exactly, but at least unclear. She is so careful that even a few white women who accidentally put a ‘pickaninny’ doll down at her feet are not frightened when Irene, a black woman, gives it back to them. The question of whether or not they accept her racial identity hangs over, especially since Irene continues with her commands with the same degree of concealment. Irene stops at the luxury hotel known for its breeze on the roof and is unhappy at the sight of a white woman sitting right across from her. What does she think, she thinks?
Thompson, the rare actress who is only at home in grandiose Marvel properties – her Falconry rides with a damn winged horse in battle and makes it look natural – while she is in more subdued periods, Irene plays as a natural observer. She looks at everything, and so does Hall, fleeting around the windy cafe, getting to know everyone and, most importantly, what they think when they look at Irene. However, no one looks louder than Clare.
Child friends who have not seen each other for almost a decade, Irene is shocked to realize that the white woman staring at her is not white at all; it’s Clare who’s bisexual, just like Irene. While different audiences will bring different levels of understanding to ‘Passing’, Hall does not feed what takes place between the women, trusting that people will get it long before Clare explains her current condition during their lengthy visit. Clare did something that shocked Irene – or is it really? – to her core: she passes so white. She married a white man (Alexander Skarsgsard, uncomfortable as the racist and sexist John Bellew), and bore him a child who is even lighter than Clare, and barely returning to the Harlem of her youth.
But when Irene sees something igniting in Clare, and Negga’s effervescent actions the clever confusion within her clever mask. As happy as Clare says she is with her life, her immediate obsession with Irene – and her subsequent insertion into almost every aspect of her life – indicates how desperate she is to share the terrible secret she has kept for so long. Thompson is all joined together nerves, and while Negga initially steals the spotlight with her bigger, brasser performance, Thompson is constantly building up to something scorching. Hall made very good choices for her debut – her entire craft department acquired rich production elements – but the cast of her songs is perhaps the best of the bunch.
It is understandable that Irene cannot shake the interaction, and when Clare receives a letter filled with floral language that makes Irene’s husband, Brian (Andre Holland) tiger, she can see the influence her old friend had on her , do not ignore. Like Larsen’s novel, Hall’s “Passing” simmers with a homo-erotic subtext that eventually makes way for jealousy and doom. Both Clare and Irene are two races, and each has made a definite choice in what part of their racial tastes defines them and the world in which they choose to live. – is it possible that something similar is happening to their sexual identity? Can we just choose who we are? And what happens to the pieces of us that we try to reject?
Not one to be rejected, Clare – which Negga plays irresistible in every sense of the word – shows up at the Harfield Brownstone of Redfields and essentially pleads to be allowed into their lives. Time to spend in Harlem, even though most people think she’s white, frees Clare to enjoy the things she’s locked out of her life for so long, even as the steady Irene reminds her of the danger in her possible exposure . Oh, but Clare is so hard to resist. Irene’s husband and lovely sons also fall under Clare’s swing in different ways, and the weaving of Clare and Irene’s lives seems completely uncomfortable.
‘Passing’ asks who is allowed in certain spaces (and who is the gatekeeper of those spaces), and what happens when people are released from them, either of their own free will or by an outside force. How do you get back in? Can you really? And what is the price for such transgressions? While Clare’s secret weakens Irene’s nerves and her sense of self, ‘Passing’ and Hall reject answers. Larsen’s novel runs a similarly tough tone and reinforces the drama without giving a sense of relief. Even when a definite conclusion is reached, the tension and questions do not stop. How can they? Larsen never decided to provide answers; just rich, searching stories rounded off in real experience – exactly what Hall translated on the big screen for her formidable first outing.
Grade: A-
‘Passing’ premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival in the American Dramatic Competition section. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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