18 thoughts on “Passing (2021)

  1. I have started watching this and so far all is excellent. I like that it was filmed in black and white and when I first saw Irene I thought she might have been the women passing, because of how she carried herself. But I quickly realised that Clare was the one passing. Clare’s husband is a piece of work. Gotta finish.

  2. I really want to see this. Would anyone else nominate Ruth N. to play Josephine Baker? She’s one of the few performers I can think of who has that ’30s aura (and inherent elegance).

    OTT and speaking of elegance: I was in Brooklyn recently and went to the Dior exhibit and IT WAS FABULOUS: beautifully installed and full of couture-as-art and attendees of all ages and colors. (Quite a few of them were like me, a jeans and sweatshirt sort of person, but we were all entranced.) If any Frock Flickers are able to be in NYC before February 22, you must go: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/christian_dior (There are also short clips on YouTube.)

        1. Oh, that’s so perfect. Has anyone seen the divine J.B. in “Zou Zou”? She is fab, even though she can’t get together with Jean Gabin’s character because, you know, they’re foster siblings. Right.

  3. I read Passing a few years ago and was blown away by it. I thought it was obscure enough and gay enough and challenging enough to the standard construct of race in the US that it didn’t ever occur to me that someone would be able to make this movie, even if they desperately wanted to. I’m so excited to watch it.

    I wrote a whole paper on the “Tragic M*latto” (not sure if it counts as a slur but I’d rather not risk it) and how often mixed-race and/or light-skinned passing characters were/are played by white people, and how the tragedy is that they could be white but won’t be accepted by white society. I also connected it to gender and sexual anxiety because Tragic M’s are usually female- frail victims that deserve to be a Victorian “angel of the house” but are denied their claim to white social circles by tragic tragic circumstances. (As opposed to darker skinned Black women, who are masculinized and by this metric don’t deserve protection or the chance to be dainty. This tracks right back to the literal dehumanization of enslaved Black women who had to prop up the Victorian angel of the house ideal by their hard manual labor, and how this was justified by framing them as masculine, not really capable of pain, or not fully human.). Male light-skinned and/or mixed race men are more often portrayed as sly, scheming or cruel because of the risk of passing men exerting real power and entering relationships with white women under false pretenses (compare the way the narrative treats the husband vs wife in Desiree’s Baby). In both cases they’re treated with shades of pity and disgust but never much empathy.

    “Passing” has tragedy in it, sure, but it’s much more about the relationship between the characters, how they navigate and utilize colorism and passing for their own reasons. The tragedy is that committed passing (as opposed to Irene briefly passing to go to a whites-only restaurant, where she re-meets Clare) means leaving behind everyone you knew and a lot of things that were part of your identity, and always being in performance mode. The book’s also gay AF so that affects my reading of it.

    1. By “how the tragedy is that they could be white but won’t be accepted by white society” I mean that that’s how the story frames it. Usually mixed-race/passing stories written by white authors are about how sad it is that light-skinned mostly-European people are affected by one-drop rules, not that the hierarchy is bad to begin with.
      I’ve heard there was a recurring demonstration where abolitionists had a fake auction where they trotted out Black people starting with very dark-skinned people and then lighter and lighter until they were bringing out people with mostly-European ancestry who’d still legally count as Black, to the shock of the (white) audience. The implication being that it was horrifying for light-skinned, mostly-European people to be enslaved… but presumably it wasn’t as bad that darker-skinned people with all-or-mostly-African ancestry would be treated like chattel. Colorism, man.

    2. There’s a whole queer subtext in the film (& book) that I didn’t want to give away in my review — just hint at with that ‘definition.’ But yeah, there’s a lot of layers to this work, & I’m amazed at how much made it into the film!

  4. I have a huge problem with the whole concept of ‘passing’. Why can’t you identify as white if you’re biracial, as almost all African Americans are to some degree. Why should society get to tell you who you really are?
    My grandfather was of mixed ancestry. For obvious reasons he chose to identify as white. I personally am whiter than Casper the Ghost. Am I ‘passing’too?

    1. Passing isn’t determined by heritage or genetics — it’s a perception, an illusion. It’s a social construct like race itself. This movie (& the book) examine the concept from two distinct sides, which may be more helpful to explain to you.

      1. I guess I agree with this movie then. Defining people by the melanin in their skin is as stupid as defining them according to who they prefer as sex partners.

  5. I’m fascinated by the comparison of the outfits in b/w and in color (especially Ms. Thompson’s red shirt/plaid coat/pink hat and how well it reads as b/w). When I worked for a museum, especially in the days of newspapers having few color images, I would always photocopy potential publicity stills in b/w so the press packets had images which worked well in both.

  6. Why is it that the 1920’s style still seem so Frickin’ FABULOUS 100 years later?!!? They’re not terribly revealing or clingy, but they are so sexy and feminine and chic.

    1. Maybe because it was the most original thing to happen in fashion in, like, ever! I love/collect/wear 20s and agree 100%

  7. I was quite taken with the film. I adore Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, and have enjoyed André Holland in everything I’ve seen him in.

    I think black and white was the only choice; I feel like it wouldn’t have the right feel otherwise. I did notice the shot choices are very claustrophobic. Period pieces shot in cities (especially American cities), regardless of the budget, tend to have tighter shots but here it is almost disquieting. All those directing choices add up to this underlying feeling of dread you feel throughout the film.

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