In 1920s Harlem, two childhood friends have a chance reunion. Irene, our mixed-race protagonist, is the wife of a black doctor. The other woman is Clare, also mixed-race, but married to a white-man and living her life by passing for white. This is the plot of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella, “Passing,” a singular work of American fiction. It 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 seminal works of Black American fiction are yet to be adapted to 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 seductive prose into a film that extends the power of the original novel.
Film adaptations of literary work are haunted by questions of fidelity. How does the film measure up to the original? Is it good? What does it miss? The questions often appear banal, except in the case of a work like “Passing” the questions of the original feel intrinsic to thinking about Hall’s work here. There’s something thrilling about Larsen’s novel. Written in 1929, her ability to present the racial politics of the contemporaneous era with such surety and methodical analysis suggests a work that was 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 contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance. A big-screen adaptation of her novel also functions as a remembrance of her legacy, and after the premiere of Hall’s “Passing” I found myself thinking of the two texts – Larsen’s and Hall’s – and their relationship to each other, and the significance of both.
The chance meeting between Irene and Clare dominates the course of the story in both texts. Despite Irene’s initial scepticism about becoming too close to Clare and her charade of passing-for-white, the women’s lives become entwined. The relationship undulates between love and friendship and moments that hint at something like romantic desire, and then jealousy. That undulation is key in the way the story depends on a level of uncertainty throughout. These are not static lives. Central to “Passing” – both in Larsen’s rich prose, but also in Hall’s adaptation – is the notion of fluidity.
Larsen is now hailed as an early American modernist writer and to read her prose is to recognise the fluidity and ambiguity of languages. From the novel’s climax there’s two lines that are stuck in my head. Larsen writes, “Whatever happened next, Irene Redfield never allowed herself to remember. Never clearly.” It’s a mere two-sentence bit but it’s a moment that textually speaks to the way that Larsen’s narrative perspective lives in the gaps and silences. It’s a fluidity that comes with ambivalence, and the marvellous thing about Hall’s adaptation is the way she frontlines that same shift of fluidity into ambivalence. James Baldwin wrote, decades after Larsen’s novel in “Notes of a Native Son”, about the ways that our desire for categorisation leads to “paradoxical distress”.
“Passing” is very much about that distress. And, so, Larsen treats these subjects with measured ambivalence as they come to recognise the blurred lines where boundaries overlap.
It’s critical to the subversiveness of the film’s semiotics and it represents Hall’s unwillingness to subscribe to any flattening of this story. On film, “Passing” exists in that liminal space that feels like a dreamscape. Shot in monochrome, on a 4:3 aspect ratio, every frame looks like a seductive tableau. It’s a level of intentionality, and artifice that might seem at odds with a film that’s engaged with illuminating aspects of the fissures of racial identity. Except, at every moment, Hall resists our ideas about what a 2021 version of a 1920s race drama would look like. Whatever film you expect from the logline, “Pass-ing” refuses to give it to you. And that refusal is testimony to the specific depth that defines the lives of Irene and Clare.
The monochrome look of the film appears heavily digitised and, at first, feels incredibly out-of-sync with the formalistic ways that Hall fashions her actors. It’s the first of many things in the film that the film rejects our categorisation of it. There’s an almost baroque quality to the music and sound design that deepen when set against the expressionistic acting but they are then further filtered through photography that feels almost distancing. Eduard Grau’s cinematography is precise and detailed, forever seeking. But, for all the time we spend with Irene on film it feels as if we know her less and less. The more “Pass-ing” goes on, though, the more the intentionality of its craft emerges as a boon.
Rebecca Hall wants us to be unsettled. “Passing” intends to unsettle. And it does. In a rare moment of literalism for the film, Irene asks if we aren’t all passing as something else and the moment is key. Artifice is central to everyone here and so the film becomes a manifestation of that artifice – but beneath the muted photography, the hints of melodrama, the curated production design – all the pretence cannot hide the aching sadness that lingers beneath. And there’s nothing that gets this better than the film’s cast. Hall, an actor herself, knows her way around these characters. She’s generous with her camera so that minor roles achieve value, but “Passing” is about the women at its centre. And, in Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Rebecca Hall has found an Irene and a Clare for the ages.
When we first meet Clare, Negga is over-lit by the camera to haunting effect and we find ourselves as disoriented as Irene. The film’s aesthetics help much in creating the unsettling sense of Clare’s idea of racial ambiguity, but the aesthetics can only do so much. Negga turns the performance into something that overwhelms. Her performance is all sensual anxiety, while Thompson’s sceptical Irene is all cerebral doubt. Together, they are astonishing. They guide the film through its formal ellipses, mimicking the gaps of Larsen’s prose.
Their first scene together, where confusion turns into recognition and then shock as Irene realises the woman in front of her is not white, but her old friend, captures the tense unease that and uncertainty that the film comes to depend on. The longing beneath the recognition goes both ways. Often, Hall implies more than she explicates leaving us to tend to the gaps in the stories, mirroring the gaps in their own lives. This preoccupation with gaps is so sharp that the film tricks us in moments where we find ourselves unable to quite mark the passage of time. We do not realise a gap exists until scenes later. It’s a disorienting effect that begins to feel like a fever-dream when the last, climactic, scene begins to unfold.
Passing is an open wound. The blood that’s spilling out of it is bitter and intoxicating and confusing and lethal. Hall leans into the specificity. Her script is a masterwork of precision but her directing is even more evocative, especially for the ways “Passing” continues to swerve out of your embrace. It courts ambiguity and resists your definition at each turn. Each moment seems to be exceeding your grasp, so just when you think you have figured out the fulcrum, it forms itself into something else. It feels valuable that the film’s lensing of 1920s race relations does not turn this into a reading of our current world. Instead, “Passing” explores the class issues, the middle-class malaise, the repression, and the ambivalent femininity of the era. But its exploration is marked by a demurring that aligns with its characters’ own hesitancy.
Adaptations of literary works often emerge as answers, but every frame in “Passing” seems as if it wants to ask you a question. It’s a dizzying effect but the discomfort is a valuable feature. Not a bug. Why should this story seek comfort? Such explicit clarity would seem out of sync for these women, whose lives are defined by the things they refuse to say. “Passing” is an intoxicating labyrinth that’s made all the better for the ways it defies your categorisation at each level. Its mysteries will linger with you for days.
Passing premiered at Sundance Film Festival and was recently acquired by Netflix for an international release later in the year.
