Film review: Passing unpacks a story about race and aspiration with dreamlike style
Shot in mesmerizing black-and-white, a tale of two women dealing with the racial segregation of 1920s New York
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson project carefully constructed realities in Passing.
Passing opens today at the Vancity Theatre, and streams on Netflix starting on November 10.
IT IS HARD to imagine a better choice than shooting Passing in black and white—and not just for the teacup-delicate, dreamlike feel the approach gives Rebecca Hall’s subtly thought-provoking film.
The cinematography echoes the way society forces a binary on people in the 1920s-set story, based on Nella Larsen’s well-known novel of the same name.
The most stunning example comes in one of the film’s early scenes, when Irene (Tessa Thompson), flapper hat pulled down to disguise her facial features, dares to take a seat in an upscale New York City tearoom with white tables, white archways, white ceiling fans, and white china. From there, a woman with bleached-blonde hair and a white dress locks eyes with her from another table: in an era of extreme segregation, neither of them “belong” to this elite world without colour.
As it turns out, these women who are “passing” for white also know each other from growing up in Harlem. Irene expresses shock when she finds out peroxide-haired Clare is now passing for white full-time, and has lied to her racist husband about her background. But uptight Irene is “passing” in her own way—and not just to get into fancy tea salons. She lives in a toney walk-up in Harlem, she’s married to a doctor, she has a (Black) maid, and she mingles with her own artistic high society.
Both become obsessed with the other’s life: Clare (in a star turn from Ruth Negga) feels painfully alone with her secret and pines for the freedom of Irene’s family and social scene in Harlem. Irene judges the danger of her friend’s decision, but forms what feels like jealousy as Clare increasingly inserts herself into Irene’s inner circle. Irene shows envy over the way her husband and sons are drawn to vivacious Clare, but possibly also over the freedom from racism that the glamorous Clare has attained by living a lie. (Irene is constantly prodding her husband to move abroad, where their race won’t be as problematic; rather than escape, he prefers to teach his sons about the ugliness of lynching and the reality of America.)
But feelings and motivations are never black and white in a film whose strengths lie in its ambiguities. Because there’s not a lot of action, we are often left to imagine what characters are thinking; frequently, it appears to be something other than what they’re saying. Both women, after all, are forced to inhabit carefully constructed personas. At times the script, which draws heavily from Larsen’s novel, can feel stage-y or affected, but then how much of the mannered dialogue reflects the two main characters’ aspirations?
Director Rebecca Hall paces the film cautiously, filling it with carefully filtered ambient sound—the muffled trumpet that floats through the Harlem neighbourhood; the sound of a ticking grandfather clock echoing in the wood-trimmed foyer of Irene’s townhouse. Paired with the black-and-white visual details—a ruffling lace curtain, the seamed stockings of two women walking on the street—Passing is often mesmerizing, Devonté Hynes’s rippling jazz piano adding to the dreamlike atmosphere. (It’s worth seeing on the big screen for this limited engagement.)
Larsen herself struggled with the in-between space of being mixed race in 1920s America, and the themes of belonging and “passing” pervade every corner of the story. Is Hall, who’s thought of as a white actor-director, the right person to interpret that tale, written by a woman who identified as Black at the turn of the last century? Hall has spoken about her own mixed-race heritage and having a grandparent who had to “pass”, but is that enough to give her ownership of a story like this? These are the exact kinds of complex questions Passing circles around—ones that may come down to whether you see the world in terms of Black and white.
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