Passing
Ruth Negga, Tessa Thompson and Rebecca Hall team up for a painfully beautiful portrait of Black women passing as white in 1920s New York.
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“We’re all of us passing for something … aren’t we?”
And there’s the rub of “Passing,” the adaptation of the 1929 novella by Nella Larsen that history has largely mislaid, rediscovered now by Rebecca Hall, the esteemed actress making her debut as director and writer.
It’s about two African-American women passing as white in 1920s New York City. Irene “Reenie” Redfield (Tessa Thompson) merely plays at this, pulling the brim of her hat down over her face while on shopping trips to lower Manhattan, spending most of her time living and reveling in the center of the Harlem Renaissance.
She enjoys being served in the white restaurants and having taxi drivers pull over without hesitation at her summons. It’s just a fun game to her.
But for her old friend Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), it’s a full-time occupation — and one with deadly potential consequences.
Clare left behind her old life in Harlem a dozen years ago, marrying a white Chicago businessman (Alexander Skarsgård) and having a daughter. She dyed her hair blonde, powders her face scrupulously and never looked back.
As the story opens Clare is preparing to move back to New York and bumps into Reenie and more or less insists upon resuming their girlish friendship. Irene is resistant, especially on meeting Clare’s husband, John, who openly declares his hatred for Negroes (using the parlance of the day).
He even playfully calls Clare “Nig” as his pet name — I think you know what it’s short for — due to her slightly dusky skin tone.
Irene thinks it’s incredibly selfish of Clare to endanger herself and her (never seen) child by continually cavorting uptown in the jazz clubs and speakeasies. But it was not unusual for the intellectuals and the rich of the day to roam the Black neighborhoods and partake in their culture — Irene herself takes barely concealed pride in her friendship with noted white author Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp).
The story moves on over the next few months and years. Irene becomes increasingly disturbed by Clare’s presence — in particular the attention she seems to command from her husband, Brian (André Holland), a well-to-do doctor. At first seeming annoyed by Clare, he practically overtakes Irene’s friendship with her and makes it the dominant relationship.
Meanwhile, their own marriage becomes increasingly strained as Brian insists on instructing their two boys about the realities of racism, reading them articles about lynchings and musing about leaving America for somewhere less hostile. (Where would that be, one wonders.)
This a fabulous-looking picture shot in luscious black-and-white by cinematographer Eduard Grau. Hall shows a practiced eye for compositions and using the physical disposition of characters and spaces to underscore the themes of the story.
For example, there’s a moment early on where Irene comes down her stairs and sees Brian talking to Claire in a mirror. The distorted reflection makes it seem as if they are leaning close to each other in an overly intimate way. But then she completes her descent and realizes they are standing well apart.
We instantly grasp her unspoken fear — one that she will help make come true, or at least perceive it as actually happening, with her suspicions and ratcheting hostility.
The New York City we see in the film is a portrait of a more gentile age, or perhaps just how we would have liked it to be. Blacks and whites moved unmolested in their own worlds and everyone understood how they would behave during the rarer instances when they crossed paths.
As long as Blacks didn’t challenge this order, they were afforded a certain measure of… is deference the right word? Independence? Studied disregard?
The characters speak in a somewhat formalized, stilted style of the time that sounds almost like poetry at times. “I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world,” Clare confesses.
Irene and Clare are pampered women with servants — Clare is careful to avoid hiring any Black ones who might see through her charade — so it might seem hard to feel anything for them. But I found myself doing just that, as we come to empathize with Clare’s bravado masking an all-consuming fear, and Irene’s tendency to want things to be a certain way to the extent she will engage in self-delusion that they actually are.
Of course, it’s Thompson and Negga who bind the material together with their subtle, deeply invested performances. This is the story of two women who are friends, but in some ways also enemies, trying to find a commonality in their experiences that is fatally undermined by the deception they both practice but in dissimilar ways.
Clare lives a lie by passing as a white woman, but Irene commits the deeper wound of lying to herself. Here is a beautiful and painful portrait of a time and place — not so unfamiliar, really — where truth was often treated as inconvenience.