Pass­ing

The 1929 nov­el ​‘Pass­ing ’ by Nel­la Larsen tells of two Black female acquain­tances who, due to the light pal­lor of their skin, are able to ​“pass” as white at the height of the Jim Crow era. Its sto­ry unfurls in the mar­gin­al­ly pro­gres­sive envi­rons of New York, where racism has become some­thing of a game, albeit one that is still able to evoke great anger and violence.

This is not real­ly a sto­ry about sub­terfuge or trick­ery – the idea that cer­tain Black peo­ple have a way of get­ting one over their white oppres­sors sim­ply by pray­ing on blind­ness and igno­rance. It’s more about options for sur­vival and what it means for a Black per­son to enter into what is per­ceived as the promised land of white largesse and freedom.

Need­less to say, this dizzy­ing­ly rich and lay­ered nov­el – an inar­guable 20^th cen­tu­ry clas­sic – seems like a tough prospect for screen adap­ta­tion, its gor­geous prose beset with traps and trip­wires. The nar­ra­tive is straight­for­ward enough, but the psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tions, the pecu­liar­i­ties of New York geog­ra­phy and the sweep­ing his­tor­i­cal con­text mean that the inti­ma­cy at its core speaks to more unpalat­able truths. Rebec­ca Hall has cho­sen to take on the book as her debut as writer/​director, and man­ages to chan­nel a decent num­ber of its stark com­plex­i­ties as well as deliv­er­ing an involv­ing drama.

We join Tes­sa Thompson’s well-to-do Ree­nie as she decides to wet her whis­tle at a ritzy Man­hat­tan hotel, where she is recog­nised by Ruth Negga’s glam­orous and osten­ta­tious Clare. The pair strike up a con­ver­sa­tion, decide to decamp to Clare’s room for cock­tails where it’s revealed that she has been pass­ing as white as a way to tran­scend the lim­it­ed social mobil­i­ty afford­ed to peo­ple of colour.

She’s got­ten her­self hitched to a dap­per gent who’s also a vir­u­lent racist (Alexan­der Skars­gård), so despite the smiles and the spritz, her life is in fact a tick­ing time bomb. Clare sees Ree­nie as the route back to her old life, but the com­bustible cli­mate makes it an impos­si­ble journey.

Hall’s reflec­tive and chal­leng­ing film is for­mal­ly stripped back and places much of the emo­tion­al heavy lift­ing on the shoul­ders of its two for­mi­da­ble leads. Neg­ga, in par­tic­u­lar, brings trag­ic Fitzgeral­dian depths to Clare where vivac­i­ty and con­fi­dence only par­tial­ly mask feel­ings of total iso­la­tion. The hand­some black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy has been used to make the film feel old timey, but also serves to empha­sise the cen­tral ruse.

Some­times the film­mak­ing doesn’t quite do enough to elic­it the req­ui­site inten­si­ty from some key con­ver­sa­tions, but it cer­tain­ly lands its most impor­tant punch, which arrives at the dev­as­tat­ing climax.