Passing review
London Film Festival series 2021
Rebecca Hall makes an impressive directorial debut with this slick monochromatic tale of identity and racial politics in America; a film rich with dreamy, Lynchian tension.
Actor turned director Rebecca Hall makes an impressive and impactful feature debut with this slick monochrome tale of racial politics in America, based on Nella Larson’s masterful 1920s novel: a touchstone of American Literature. This feature was another I was lucky enough to see at London Film Festival, but was a film I knew little about. What an impactful piece it turned out to be. Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga) are two women of colour, former school friends who run into each other by chance in an upscale Manhattan hotel in 20s America. They are both light-skinned, but Irene finds that the high-spirited Clare has been “passing” for white, and that her appalling, wealthy white husband John (Alexander Skarsgård) is completely unaware.
We follow Irene as she navigates her friendship with Clare, while Hall explores the deceptive nature in which all characters ‘pass’ for something within the rigid social customs of American society. Even the sober middle class ‘happiness’ that Irene seems to inhabit is slowly revealed to be another illusion through which she ‘passes.’ This is all underscored by the recurring use of the hypnotic, dreamlike ‘The Homeless Wanderer’ by 20s Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, which contributes further to the off-kilter atmosphere through the duality of elegance and foreboding in its twinkling melody.
Hall shoots Irene’s gradual mental breakdown with an underbelly of Lynchian tension; there is a dreamy, transfixing quality, as the seamless respectability of Irene begins to shatter in the race towards the films screeching climax.
On Netflix now. Click to see trailer.