Passages, review: Ben Whishaw's sexy love triangle vibrates with longing

In Ira Sachs’s sinewy, sexually explicit and beautifully constructed romantic drama Passages, one selfish man leaves a trail of emotional devastation behind him. That man is Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski, a wolfish troublemaker with charisma to spare), who is ping-ponging between his long-term live-in boyfriend Martin (Ben Whishaw) and a young woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who Tomas has a drunken night with before it blooms into a whole affair.

Tomas is the kind of guy who turns up to meet his girlfriend’s parents wearing a mesh crop-top from the night before, radiating the scent of sex with somebody else. He’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t even have the wherewithal to be embarrassed about it. He survives on a vagabond charm and the rep he gets from his career as a film director: when he meets Agathe, a schoolteacher by trade, his drunken decision to experiment with a woman in spite of being in a gay relationship leads to a sexual infatuation, with the pair seemingly unable to stop pushing up against each other near every available wall, sofa, chair, or table.

As you might imagine, this is a very sexy film: even as this ill-fated love triangle shifts between power dynamics, sexuality, heartbreak and rage, Passages is rampantly lusty. And that’s even when you know the untrammeled sensuality on display is liable to end in cataclysm.

Sachs has a talent for nurturing remarkable performances from his actors, and Passages is also perfectly calibrated in this respect. Rogowski, an arthouse favourite of directors like Christian Petzold and Michael Haneke, has the predatory, restless energy that makes him utterly believable as this faithless boyfriend; Whishaw offers a masterclass in minor-key heartbreak. One quietly played, truth-telling scene between Whishaw and Exarchopoulos, as they sit opposite each other in a restaurant, is a particular standout.

On a physical level, the heated energy and frisson between the leads is almost like a miasma lifting off the screen: they are filmed with appreciative zeal that lingers on side profiles and the crooks of necks, thighs and navels, a caressing gaze mainly focused on male nudity that never feels aggressive or icky.

Instead, it bathes its actors in halos of warm light, giving them a luminous beauty, and delights in clothing them gorgeously in order to undress them later. The film is sensual at a cellular level, and it’s probably why the sex in it is so steamy and talked-about. As the dynamics between these three people change and eventually alter the lives of all involved, Sachs depicts the pain and the pleasure of the messes we make when we blindly follow desire.