Passing review – elegant portrait of yearning femininity

Tessa Thompson keeps her eyes concealed for quite some time in Rebecca Hall’s Passing. As Irene, she is cautious, minding her own business in a toy shop while white women debate a piccaninny rag doll. She won’t let the colour of her skin determine her worth, but her morals become a lot more complex when her childhood friend Clare arrives back into her life.

Clare is played by Ruth Negga, in what is certain to become one of the most vibrant and devastating performances of the year. There’s a hint of Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan in her carefree, playful seduction, the way she fizzes with a lust for life as she gleefully goes around as a light-skinned Black woman passing as white. It is the relationship between these two women – each admiring the other’s identity, their sense of belonging and purpose that comes with it – that tears their worlds apart.

The story takes stock of Nella Larsen’s novella of the same name, and sees Hall make her debut as writer-director after a string of tremendous performances as an actor. She’s wrestling with her own biracial heritage, too, and frames the shattering story of Clare and Irene with elegance and empathy.

Passing is gorgeously lensed, with A Simple Man cinematographer Eduard Grau finding a soft glow in monochrome hues, letting the guarded emotions of these women come to the fore through piercing, stolen gazes – you don’t need colour to know when the blood rushes to their cheeks. It’s a film deeply felt in music, too, with Devonte Hynes working with Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou’s “The Homeless Wanderer” and his own delicate piano motifs, narrating the film in-between conversations with nothing more than tinkling keys.

It’s a compelling commentary on race, gender and class in 1920s Harlem – but the ideas here have never stopped being relevant. “We’re all passing for one thing or another, aren’t we?” Clare teases Irene. The stakes rise with the two women’s husbands – Alexander Skarsgard plays Clare’s husband John (will he ever play anyone who isn’t an awful person?), Andre Holland is Irene’s husband Brian – and the subtle, but still potent, erotic tension grows between the two women without ever fully erupting. These dynamics, of companionship and expectation and jealousy, still threaten and enliven our existences, almost 100 years on.

Passing ends in tragedy, but the sort that lingers, and keeps you asking questions. Was it an accident? What would have been said if there had been more time? Can you really live a lie without it ruining everything you love? Hall lets these women carefully dance around the questions, and knows answers are never easy. And anyway, questions are so much more romantic.

Passing was screened as part of the Sundance Film Festival 2021. A release date is yet to be announced.