In 1920s Harlem, two childhood friends are having a chance reunion. Irene, our main mixed-race character, is the wife of a black doctor. The other woman is Clare, who is also mixed race, but married to a white man and lives her life by passing for white. This is Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” a solo work of American fiction. This is also the plot of Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of that novel, which premiered at the end of January at the Sundance Film Festival.
Many pioneering works of black American fiction have yet to be adapted into film and “Passing” marks the first adaptation of Nella Larsen’s work. Rebecca Hall, daughter of mixed-race opera singer Maria Ewing, writes and directs the film and in the adaptation manages to transpose Larsen’s sharp and gripping prose into a film that extends the power of the original novel.
Movie adaptations of literary works are inspired by fidelity questions. How does the film measure up to the original? Is it good? What is he missing? The questions often seem banal, except in the case of works such as “Pass” the original’s questions feel intrinsic to Hall’s work here. There is something thrilling about Larsen’s novel. Written in 1929, her ability to present contemporary racial politics with such certainty and methodical analysis suggests work written years after it was set. Despite a revival of interest in her work in the late 20th century, Larsen has not experienced as much critical or popular attention as her male Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. A large-screen adaptation of her novel also serves as a memento of her legacy, and after the premiere of “Passing” Hall I found myself thinking about the two texts – Larsen’s Hall’s – and their relationship to each other, and the significance of the two.
The chance meeting between Irene and Clare dominates the course of the story in both texts. Despite Irene’s initial skepticism about getting too close to Clare and her passing-on-white charade, the women’s lives are plummeting. The relationship melds between love and friendship and moments that suggest something like romantic desire, and then jealousy. That wagon is key in how the story relies on a level of uncertainty throughout. These are not fixed lives. Central to “Passing” – in Larsen’s rich prose, but also in Hall’s adaptation – is the idea of fluidity.
Larsen is now known as an early American modernist writer and to read her prose is to acknowledge the fluidity and ambiguity of languages. From the climax of the novel there are two lines stuck in my head. Larsen writes, “Whatever happened next, Irene Redfield never left herself to remember. Never clear. ”It’s a two-sentence piece only but it’s a moment that speaks textually to how Larsen’s narrative perspective lives in the gaps and the silence. It’s a liquidity that comes with ambiguity, and the wonderful thing about Hall’s adaptation is the way in which she is at the front line of the same liquidity move to ambiguity. James Baldwin, decades after Larsen’s novel in “Notes of a Native Son”, wrote about the ways in which our desire for categorization leads to “paradoxical turmoil”.
“Passing” is very much about that misery. And, therefore, Larsen treats these topics with a cautious ambiguity as they come to recognize the blurred lines where boundaries overlap.
It is essential to the reversibility of the film’s semiotics and represents Hall’s reluctance to subscribe to any flattening of this story. On film, “Passing” exists in that cramped space that feels like a landscape. Shot in monochrome, at a 4: 3 aspect ratio, each frame looks like an attractive plateau. It’s a level of intentionality, and an art that might seem contradictory to a film that deals with enlightened aspects of racial identity cleavages. Except, at every moment, Hall resists our ideas of what the 2021 version of a 1920s race drama would look like. Whatever movie you expect from the log line, “Pass-ing” refuses to give it to you. And that rejection is testament to the particular depth that defines Irene and Clare’s lives.
The monochrome look of the film seems heavily digitized and at first feels incredibly inconsistent with the formal ways in which Hall fashioned his actors. This is the first of many things in the film from which the film refuses to categorize us. The music and sound design has an almost baroque quality that deepens when set against the expressive acting but then filtered further through photography that feels almost distant. Eduard Grau cinematography is precise and precise, trying forever. But, for all the time we spend with Irene on film it feels like we know her less and less. The more “Pass-ing” goes on, the more intentionality of his craft emerges as a boost.
Rebecca Hall wants us to be unstoppable. “Passing” intends to get upset. And it does. In a rare moment of literalism for the film, Irene asks if we all pass as something else and the moment is key. Artifice is at the heart of everyone here and so the film becomes a manifestation of that artifice – but under the silent photography, the hints of velodrama, the curated production design – it can’t all pretend hide the painful sadness that lies beneath. And there’s nothing that enhances this than the cast of the film. Hall, an actor himself, knows his way around these characters. She is generous with her camera so that minor roles deliver value, but “Pass” is about the women in the middle of it. And, in Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Rebecca Hall has found Irene and Clare for the ages.
When we first meet Clare, Negga is over-lit by the camera for a terrifying effect and we find ourselves as confused as Irene. The film’s aesthetics help a lot to create the annoying sense of Clare’s idea of racial ambiguity, but the aesthetics can only do so much. Negga turns the performance into something overwhelming. Her performance is all sensory anxiety, while Thompson’s skeptical Irene is all cerebral skepticism. Together, they are stunning. They guide the film through its formal ellipses, mimicking Larsen’s prose gaps.
Their first scene is not together, where confusion turns into recognition and then shock as Irene realizes that the woman in front of her is not white, but her old friend, conveys the unease full time and uncertainty that the film comes to rely on. The longing under the recognition goes both ways. Hall often suggests more than she reveals leaving us to tend to the gaps in the stories, reflecting the gaps in their own lives. This fascination with gaps is so sharp that the film deceives us in moments where we find ourselves unable to quite pinpoint the passage of time. We do not realize that a gap exists until later scenes. It’s a confusing effect that begins to feel like a feverish dream when the final, climatic scene begins to unfold.
Passing is an open wound. The blood pouring out of it is bitter and intoxicating and confusing and fatal. Hall deviates into the specificity. Her script is a masterpiece of precision but her directing is even more evocative, especially about the ways in which “Pass” continues to deviate from your embrace. It courts ambiguity and always defies your definition. Every moment seems to surpass your grip, so just when you think you’ve figured out the fulcrum, it forms itself into something else. It feels valuable that lensing the film of race relations from the 1920s does not turn this into a reading of our current world. Instead, “Passing” explores issues of class, middle-class malice, oppression, and ambiguous femininity of the age. But his exploration is marked by a provocation that aligns with the betruster of his own characters.
Adaptations of literary works often come up as answers, but each frame in “Passing” seems to ask you a question. It is a mild effect but the discomfort is a valuable feature. Not a bug. Why should this story seek comfort? Such explicit clarity would seem incongruous to these women, whose lives are defined by the things they refuse to say. “Passing” is an intoxicating labyrinth that has done much better for the ways it challenges your categorization at all levels. His mysteries will stick with you for days.
It passed for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival and was recently purchased by Netflix for international release later in the year.