Passages

I saw the movie Passages earlier today and left the theater shaking my head. The main character was such a man-baby and an emotional vampire to his husband and to the woman he had a relationship with. First, he left his husband to take up with a woman he met at a nightclub. (And the woman knew he was gay and married to a man because she met them both at the club and they told her what was up!) But, after leaving his husband and moving in with the woman, the man-baby decided he still wanted to be with his husband. So he moved back and forth from the pole to the hole while alienating both his husband and the woman. What a hot mess! By the end of the movie, I wanted to ring this guy's neck. At one point he's riding his bike through the streets of Paris and I kept waiting (hoping?) for a bus or a car to take him out. It's been a long time since I've seen a movie that got me so riled up but Passages did it! I highly recommend checking it out if you're into messy relationship movies (as I am since I write messy relationship stories).

I'd read a few articles about Passages before I saw the movie and the director, Ira Sachs, talked about being slapped initially with an NC-17 rating for the film, something he felt was unfair and only assigned to his film because it contained a gay sex scene. After seeing the movie, I agree with him. There was no peen shown and the sex between the two men wasn't anymore graphic than a sex scene between a man and a woman would have been. The film review board claimed the NC-17 rating wasn't because of the gay sex, but I don't believe that. Sachs wisely chose to go with an Unrated rating for his film rather than the NC-17. It's high time the movie ratings board pulled their heads out of the sand and stopped being so prudish about sex. It's 2023, not 1953.