For Franz Rogowski’s Tomas, the spoiled, petulant, fragile soul that tears through Ira Sachs’ Passages, it is not enough to simply adore and be adored. For him, love must be cataclysmic.
He is a German director married to Martin (Ben Whishaw), an English printmaker. They’ve carved out a pleasantly bourgeois life for themselves in Paris. At the wrap party for Tomas’s latest film, some starchy period piece also called Passages, Martin declines to dance with his husband. Tomas instead takes to the dance floor with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a French schoolteacher with a beautiful face and a bright, inquisitive nature. She takes him back to hers. They have sex.
