Passages was one of the most-acclaimed films to premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. IndieWire called it a “signature new drama” that’s “both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness,” while Time Out New York praised the film for being “sexy, sad, and so very French.” The Motion Picture Association is fine with the sadness and the Frenchness, but not the sexiness.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Passages, about a gay couple (Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw, a.k.a. the voice of Paddington) living in Paris whose marriage is tested when one of them has an affair with a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos), has been given a rare NC-17 rating by the MPA.
“There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” co-writer and director Ira Sachs told the Times. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.” The film’s distributor, Mubi, is “deeply disappointed” by the ruling.
“Passages is an honest and groundbreaking portrait of contemporary relationships, both queer and straight. Frank and thoughtful portrayals of sex are essential to cinematic storytelling and in service of representation more broadly. An NC-17 rating suggests the film’s depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is also false.”
An NC-17 rating hurts a film’s chance at box office success, but more importantly (and considering the subject matter), it’s a form of censorship. “It’s so 1950s that [the ratings system] still exists,” Sachs said. “We’re talking about a board that is not visible, that doesn’t make its rules known, that exists in silence. We’re talking about a select group of people who have a certain bent, which seems anti-gay, anti-progress, anti-sex — a lot of things which I’m not.”
Passages open in Los Angeles and New York on August 4 before a wider expansion. You can watch the trailer below.
(Via the Los Angeles Times)