Critics reviews

As the daughter of white theatre director Peter Hall and mixed-race opera singer Maria Ewing, who herself had a family legacy of passing, she translates Larsen’s novel to the screen with the tact and grace it requires — but also the cutting emotional candour of someone who knows how these issues wound and weigh on the soul.

The drama unfolds in a hypnotic and dreamlike state, an almost Lynchian swoon, with ambient sounds and eerie piano music swarming up from unknowable depths. It is shot in a crisp monochrome which elegantly finesses the issue of skin colour: finally, an increasing swirl of chilly snow from the night sky will turn the screen white.

What all these figures have in common is the desire for a quick-fix escape and when they discuss the lure of the exotic, and what it means to go slumming, Passing feels ridiculously pertinent to our times. Hall’s first film suggests systemic racism makes imposters of us all.

There’s never a sense that Hall wants to use Passing to impose a strict historical narrative – it is a sensory film, rooted firmly in the individual... It’s tense but thrillingly alive, which works as a broader description of Hall’s directing style.

Yet it’s ambiguity that dominates the film, a series of gorgeously shot episodes that are often dramatically oblique in isolation but combine to form a mesmerising, deeply disquieting experience.

This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements. There’s heavy material here, but “Passing” doesn’t belabor its points... The entire film exists in this perpetual state of a deceptively gentle push and pull. It’s a masterful balance of tone. And even though we anticipate the ending, it comes with a surprising amount of empathy and sadness, two things that were always subtly present during the runtime.

The film feels like a passion project for Hall, who has a mixed-race background herself, on her mother’s side. And she clearly has the sensibility to flesh out all the complex story’s subtleties and nuances, shooting in artful black-and-white that paradoxically highlights and erases racial differences, and with a squared-off aspect ratio that underscores the film’s sense of constraint.

After establishing the characters with such elegance and grace, the movie proceeds to nudge them toward an endpoint that is beautifully shot but curiously chilly, lacking the catharsis of something more old-fashioned. There’s strain in the movie’s restraint, frozen as it is between the melodrama of the past and the fire of the present.

Passing grapples with racial politics and colourism, before, in its final moments, conceding that fighting against the stolidity of whiteness is futile. The film ends with a snowstorm, flakes whirling against the New York sky, powder blanketing the streets. These beautiful images deliver a dispiriting but relevant message: whiteness envelopes everything eventually.

Stylistically, Hall opts to follow the lead of a lot of recent arthouse films by shooting it in boxy academy ratio to signify how hemmed in her characters are – and her use of black-and-white can seem similarly on the nose. Yet there are inspired touches too, such as the way she films exterior scenes with a kind of over-exposed look, as if the image system of the film itself is pressuring the characters to live in a lighter, whiter world intent on systematically eradicating their true selves.

Hall’s direction imparts a lacquered good taste: lustrous, high-contrast, black-and-white cinematography, dramatic pacing like walking in fine shoes, and a period-appropriate jazz score by electronic musician Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange... but critically, Hall can’t find a strong substitution for the lead character Irene’s... inner monologue in the text. Reading Passing is like being immersed in an anxiety attack, with Irene’s emotional dilemmas haunting and palpable; the film is typical of literary adaptations that one regularly sees from British directors, where canonical texts are brought to the screen with a respectful, cautious stiffness.

Passing is a solid adaptation in the sense that it does a good job of faithfully converting Larsen’s novel in a way that does a decent job of limiting the inherent losses that come in making the jump from text to screen, but does not add anything new to the mix to compensate for that which ultimately cannot make the transition effectively.