Netflix’s Passing Is an Unusually Gentle Movie About a Brutal Subject Rebecca Hall’s film about two Black women sharing a dangerous secret in 1920s America is as delicate as it is tense......... Two women, Irene (played by Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), rekindle their friendship after years apart. Once playmates as children, they evolve as adults into each other’s confidants. ......... The relationship’s ease, though, is illusory. Irene and Clare are light-skinned Black women who can pass for white, but while the former rarely strays past the color line, the latter has crossed it entirely. Clare has dyed her hair a shimmery blond and shed her origins, to the point where even her husband, John (Alexander Skarsgård), believes her to be white. Her secret transforms the women’s friendship into something stranger: a genuine but risky intimacy, built on their shared knowledge of Clare’s true identity. ......... people navigating our country’s contradictions. ......... the rare film about race that treats the turbulence of its subject matter with a delicate touch
. ......... As much as the story may be about the effects of living in a racist society, not once does the movie depict physical violence by white characters. Instead, it draws tension from the psychological torment of two people who have taken entirely different approaches to their identity, each repressing elements of herself to survive. The film is told not through extravagant set pieces or scenes of emotional catharsis, but through meaningful looks and longing glances between the leads. Though tears are shed and tea sets get shattered, the real force of Passing comes from the anguish that Irene and Clare feel but can’t reveal.
........... she began adapting Larsen’s novel after learning that her own Black grandfather had passed as a white man .......... The two women are seduced and repelled by how the other lives.
......... Clare considers rewriting her history to be worth the cost of living a dishonest life; John is wealthy and respected, and she can go anywhere she likes as his wife. But her vivacity elides a desperation to immerse herself in the culture she abandoned. Each woman believes the other to have a kind of freedom and safety she cannot obtain. .......... the societal lines Irene and Clare believe are being blurred only sharpen as a result of their efforts. ....... snipes at her darker-skinned housemaid and gossips about Clare with a white writer who attends the Negro Welfare League parties she helps organize. Who’s the one betraying her identity more? Who actually leads the more dangerous life? ........... The tragedy of Irene and Clare rests not in the question of whether the act of passing is morally defensible but in the fact that neither can fully provide an answer. In 1920s America, a repressive world of social norms and niceties, they don’t have the words to express exactly what they feel. ....... tells their story in the fragile silences they share.
