---

Filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his printmaker husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) absconded to Paris about six years ago and have remained there ever since. We sense, almost immediately, a couple likely to prematurely scratch — hard — the supposed seven-year itch if they haven’t already. Kisses hello and goodbye are rare, pleasant small talk rarer; the radiating sense of toleration and obligation endemic to long-term relationships with a coming-up expiration date defines their own. So it isn’t unexpected, then, when Tomas, the more free-spirited of the pair, starts having an affair early in the movie — one that leaves him a little aghast himself since it’s not a man he’s stepping out with but a woman: a teacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), with whom he has some friends in common. 

But the directions in which the affair will go are unexpected. Dramas about infidelity are prone, though not always, to dramatizing one-track-minded attempts to legitimize something illicit. The ramifications are usually terrible for everybody involved. In Passages, the new movie from Ira Sachs, the ramifications are definitely terrible. But Tomas distinguishes himself among his adulterous forebears in that he immediately tells his husband what he’s done — he unhesitantly goes on about how nice a change of pace it was to be with a woman — then spends nearly all of the movie flighty about where he actually wants things to go with both the husband and the mistress. 

Read the rest of the column on South Sound.