Passing – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Pass­ing – first-look review

31 Jan 2021

Words by Leila Latif

Two women in winter clothing, one holding a basket, walking on a city street. Black and white image with a vintage aesthetic.
Two women in winter clothing, one holding a basket, walking on a city street. Black and white image with a vintage aesthetic.
Ruth Neg­ga and Tes­sa Thomp­son star in this slow-paced but per­cep­tive race dra­ma from Rebec­ca Hall.

Rebec­ca Hall’s direc­to­r­i­al debut exudes con­fi­dence. The styling, the enun­ci­at­ed dia­logue, the restrained per­for­mances, the neo-clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, the con­fi­dent­ly lan­guid pac­ing, Pass­ing has an almost aris­to­crat­ic air about it. This adap­ta­tion of Nel­la Larsen’s 1929 nov­el tells the sto­ry of Irene (Tes­sa Thomp­son) and Clare (Ruth Neg­ga), pale-skinned Black women who knew each oth­er in Chica­go as chil­dren and reunite as adults in New York City, where they live on dif­fer­ent sides of the racial divide.

Irene is hap­pi­ly mar­ried to a hand­some Black doc­tor (André Hol­land), rais­ing two sons in a pala­tial brown­stone in Harlem. Clare has dyed her hair blonde and adopt­ed a stilt­ed accent to pass as white. She is mar­ried to a wealthy white man, John (Alexan­der Skars­gård), who open­ly hates negroes” and affec­tion­ate­ly teas­es Clare for her per­sis­tent tan. The women become increas­ing­ly infat­u­at­ed with one another’s lives and entan­gled in each other’s identities.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly for an actor-turned-direc­tor, the strength of Hall’s direc­tion is in the per­for­mances she draws out of her cast. Thomp­son is won­der­ful as the increas­ing­ly para­noid and brit­tle Irene; she suits the fast-paced 1920s dia­logue and slides effort­less­ly into Katharine Hep­burn-esque wit­ty lyri­cism. Hol­land is also giv­en space to shine, play­ing a charm­ing man weighed down by the ever-present threat of racial pro­fil­ing and lynching.

But best of all is Neg­ga, play­ing a very real, deeply con­flict­ed per­son buried beneath lay­ers of arti­fice. She con­veys Clare’s human­i­ty with the hard shell of an enig­mat­ic Hitch­cock­ian blonde. The film is also exceed­ing­ly beau­ti­ful, the black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy giv­ing the actors a sculp­tur­al qual­i­ty. Hall picks out light and shad­ow to make race feel all the more arbi­trary, but she also height­ens the radi­ance and dra­ma of her sub­jects’ exquis­ite bone struc­ture. This aes­thet­ic extends beyond the cast as aer­i­al shots of breath­tak­ing com­po­si­tion are formed through geo­met­ric pat­terns of build­ings, bod­ies, shad­ow and snow.

It is also to Hall’s cred­it that she is large­ly able to han­dle the com­pli­cat­ed issues of race posed by this sto­ry: the unspo­ken pride and thrill of pass­ing”; the colourism present between Irene and her dark-skinned maid; the inter­nalised racism of Black women and the grad­ual trau­ma of liv­ing each day fear­ing your chil­dren will be lynched. Hall her­self comes from a lin­eage of pale-skinned pass­ing” Black peo­ple and her per­son­al con­nec­tion to the sub­ject is evident.

The film has its flaws: the rep­e­ti­tion of sets makes New York feel claus­tro­pho­bi­cal­ly small, and at times it can feel repet­i­tive and slow. But this restraint pays off in the sud­den turns of the final act. Despite its imper­fec­tions, this is a beau­ti­ful­ly craft­ed piece of film­mak­ing and one that her­alds an excit­ing new direc­tion for Hall. Here’s hop­ing she can bring this lev­el of artistry to her future projects.

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