‘These interviews are full of shit,” says Franz Rogowksi, eyeballing the webcam in his Berlin apartment, a slash of Sunday morning sunshine streaking the wall behind him. This would be an awkward moment were the vulpine 37-year-old actor not wearing a lopsided smile, his voice free of rancour or complaint. What he is trying to get across is that there are certain conventions when promoting a movie. “People say: ‘Oh, this is so amazing, the project was so amazing.’ You and I would be having this exact same conversation even if this movie was shit. But I truly love what we’ve done.”
The movie in question is Passages, a caustic, concentrated, jaggedly funny and aggressively erotic portrait of a relationship in freefall. Rogowski plays Tomas, a film-maker living in chic luxury in Paris with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw). After wrapping his new film, also called Passages, Tomas goes home with a schoolteacher called Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), whom he meets in a club. Martin is bruised by this dalliance, not least when Tomas starts crowing about how blissful it was, but he takes it wearily in his stride. “You’re always like this when you finish a film,” he says. “You just forget.” This, however, is no fling.
