For her first film as a writer-director, Rebecca Hall, usually seen in front of the camera in films including Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Awakening, has faithfully adapted Nella Larsen’s short 1929 novel about two black women who have a chance meeting in 1920s Manhattan.
The two women haven’t seen each other since they were kids in Harlem and both are now in their thirties and married, living superficially comfortable lives. But one of their circumstances is more immediately eye-opening: Clare (Ruth Negga) now ‘passes’ as white to almost everyone she meets, including her white husband, Jack (Alexander Skarsgård), whose brief appearance reveals him as a vicious racist (and underlines the danger of ‘crossing the colour line’ in 1920s America – a reality which Passing explores with intimate, sensitive precision).
It’s Clare’s appearance, bumping into Irene in the tearoom of a fancy hotel that sets off the charge of Larsen’s story. But it’s Irene (Tessa Thompson) who Passing is really about: after that first meeting she resists, unsuccessfully, letting Clare into her settled Harlem domestic and social lives, where her husband Brian (André Holland) is a doctor and she’s a pillar of the neighbourhood scene. What Clare stirs in Irene – and what those stirrings say about her – is the engrossing central puzzle of the film.
It’s striking how close Hall has stayed not only to the atmosphere and spirit of Larsen’s story, but also to the detail, give or take the odd nip and tuck.
