Hello, friends!

Next week is Doctober opening week at the Pickford, and starting on October 6, our screens will be fully devoted to a plethora of fabulous documentaries as well as to one new theatrical release (Kitty Green’s phenomenal Royal Hotel).  So -- in this final week leading up to Doctober, we have a veritable smorgasbord to offer you, some last chances to see our summer hits and a one week chance to see a couple of new films.

Passages, the newest film from Ira Sachs, is the kind of film we love to celebrate at the Pickford, particularly because it’s a film that will not be found in commercial movie theaters but that represents the kind of filmmaking that is often the most exciting and thought-provoking cinematic art of the moment. Passages is both brilliant and thorny, depicting a love triangle (Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos) and offering a sensitive and provocative examination of relationships, intimacy, and boundaries. I am always fascinated by central characters who are not particularly heroic and even often deeply troubling (see, for example, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver), and Passages offers us just such a fascination. The central character here, played by the incredibly versatile Rogowski, becomes someone who, over the course of the film, is increasingly difficult to like. He is beautifully contrasted by the utterly winsome characters played by Whishaw and Exarchopoulos, and the film, ultimately, offers a challenge to our ideas of relationships and love as much as it challenges our notion of character. It's a film that induced a decidedly strong reaction in me, and I'm still grappling with it: such staying power in a film is both rare and exhilarating. 

I should note, too, that Passages made a splash at Sundance earlier this year and then an even bigger splash when it was smacked by the M.P.A.A. with the NC-17 rating, most critics and industry folks noting -- I think, correctly -- that the rating was linked to a homophobic impulse and the inclusion of gay sex in the film, more than to the sexual content itself, which is frank and intimate but not more explicit than other heterosexual R-rated films.  Further, as Roger Ebert famously said, “It’s not what a film’s about but how it’s about it,” and I think that applies here: the bare fact of the sexual content is less interesting than how the film handles it. There's a fantastic piece in the NYT about the film's sexual content as it is, quite crucially, linked to character development and story, and it's an especially interesting piece given that Adèle Exarchopoulos has had a career shaped by discussions about sex in film since her role in Blue Is the Warmest Color. Exarchopoulos contrasts her experience of that earlier film (a traumatic, negative experience) to her experience of this new film, noting that the sex in Passages is, in fact, crucial, rather than exploitative. It’s a film that has generated deep discussions in the critical community, and I look forward to the discussion it generates here.