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PASSING THROUGH IRA SACHS 22.08.23 Irish Film Ins
titute Archive + Meeting House Square Director Ira Sachs is in Dublin for the first time in support of his latest film Passages. We sit down in the IFI on the morning of its premiere. He arrived the night before and managed to make it to the sea with his good friend Seamus and ended up at Panti Bar. “I feel very moved by Dublin quite quickly,” he says. “It’s a new relationship.” We later dropped in for a Q&A after the premiere also. “He knows me so well.” – Tomas “So that’s why you left him?” – Agathe The ‘navigation of intimacy’ is a concept we keep circling back to in our chat about Passages, a Parisian-based drama which unfolds when Tomas (Franz Rogowski) begins an affair with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The twist in the tale is Tomas is married to Martin (Ben Wishhaw), though their relationship is floundering. What is set in trail is a story of passion and desire – one which emerged from Sachs’ own personal experience of lockdown. “I think for me desire is another name for want and I try to make a cinema of want,” he explains. “Achieving intimacy at home is the central desire of all the characters in all my films and so there needs to be obstacles.” This one leads to a sensual explosion with Tomas at the centre of the emotional Venn diagram. “I used to describe him an anti-hero but now I think he’s a hero in that you identify with his desires and you feel, to some extent, the pleasure of him not achieving them but, in other ways, you want him to be whole. You want him to find stasis which doesn’t seem possible.” As a queer film-maker, Sachs has always been finely attuned to the world he knows best since his debut feature The Delta (1996) which explored closeted desires through Love is Strange (2014) which dealt with an older gay couple keeping their relationship intact via new living arrangements. Restraint and credibility have been staples of his work and even though there is a sensual volatility pulsing through Passages, it stays anchored to a narrative we invest in. “My relationship with Mauricio (Zacharias, his co-writer) begins with an idea and weeks of conversation around a story idea, other movies and our own experiences. Then he goes off and writes the first draft and over time I write the last one which is very much influenced by what I discover in the process of making the movie – the actors, the location, the city – for example, I didn’t know the film would end on a bicycle until I met Franz who is an extraordinary crazy bike rider.” They originally wrote the script for Rogowski who first blew his mind performing karaoke to Sia’s Chandelier in Michael Haneke’s Happy End, “It’s cinema incarnate, full of violence and humour and physicality.” This free-wheeling sense of escapism can also read as an elusive search for happiness, one which Tomas struggles to define the parameters of. In terms of his approach to film-making, Sachs says he tries, “to consider films as openended but with completion. There may not be resolutions but if it works well there’s satisfaction. I consider each scene in this film like a series of middles, the whole film in itself is a passage and a moment of transition which is something cinema captures very well. You can imagine there’s a past and there’s a future but it’s not stated.” When it comes to the affair at the heart of Passages, Sachs offered a candid insight into it that evening in the IFI, “I’m a 57-year-old gay man and I wrote the script and gave it to my 57-year-old friends and they were like, ‘Well I don’t know if I can believe he’s (Tomas) going to sleep with a 48