A love triangle threatens to collapse

  

 American indie director Ira Sachs travels to Paris for Passages, a movie about a love triangle. Sachs's story acquires extra spin because the triangle's two men are a gay married couple, one of whom begins a torrid affair with a woman.

   Gender issues aside, Sachs explores issues of ego, trust, and self-deception in ways that make for an engaging drama about a pivotal moment in three lives.

   Franz Rogowski (Undine, Great Freedom) plays Tomas, a film director who’s wrapping a production when the movie begins. Insistent and headstrong, Tomas meets Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos of Blue is the Warmest Colour) at the company’s wrap party. She's in the process of dumping her current lover.

   When Ben Whishaw’s Martin, Tomas's husband, decides to leave the party early, Tomas takes up with Agathe, perhaps because he’s miffed at Martin or perhaps because his insatiable ego demands a celebratory conquest.

     None of this would make sense, if Tomas weren’t charming and assertive. He quickly establishes intimacy with others but also harbors an ego-driven sense of entitlement about the lives and, let's be frank, the bodies of others.

      When Tomas begins an affair with Agathe, he tells Tomas about it, treating it as no big deal. He explains that he’s reinvigorated and excited. He thinks Martin should understand -- and even be happy about the whole business.

      For her part, Agathe, a teacher by trade, knows about Tomas’s relationship with Martin and seems willing to accept it — up to a point. That point eventually will arrive.

     The screenplay by Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias and Arlette Langmann explores these relationships as they stumble along, overlapping at times. It's difficult to believe that the situation can be sustained.

      Any sympathy we have for Tomas stems from the fact that his audaciousness appears to be uncalculated. He can't help being a jerk and even concocts a fantasy in which he can keep both lovers. When Martin dates a novelist (Erwan Kepoa Fale), Tomas ignores his own philandering and becomes unjustifiably jealous. His gall seems boundless.

      A carefully developed personal drama, Passages revolves around Tomas’s actions but doesn’t shortchange the other characters. 

      I wondered whether the explicitness of the sex scenes was necessary but assumed that Sachs wanted to show that a good deal of the attraction here is sexual. Why pretend otherwise? (The film is unrated.)

      No fair telling how the conflict resolves but Passages entangles us in the lives of its characters and has a feeling of plausibility, perhaps because Sachs allows the story to unfold within a small circle, the kind that can, and sometimes does, lead to the unhappy point where folks become lost.

        Put another way: When a triangle collapses, someone's bound to be hurt.

A movie that can't match an extraordinary life

Ralph Fiennes directs The White Crow, a choppy bio-pic about ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

Actor Ralph Fiennes again moves behind the camera to direct The White Crow, the story of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. But rather than soaring, his movie slogs, perhaps because an extraordinary life deserves an extraordinary movie. Structurally choppy and unevenly acted, The White Crow seldom gets beyond adequate.

Aside from his dance career (or perhaps in conjunction with it), Nureyev became an international celebrity after defecting to the West in 1961. Regarded as one of the premier male dancers of his day, Nureyev turned his back on the Soviet Union while touring with the Kirov Ballet in Paris.

In the White Crow, Fiennes touches on various incidents in Nureyev's life. But he doesn't infuse his movie with any overriding point of view about artistry, politics or even the world of ballet.

Burdened by flashbacks to Nureyev's childhood, the movie features a Nureyev played by Ukrainian dancer Oleg Ivenko. Ivenko's Nureyev comes across as a vibrant, assertive young man with a killer stage presence that sometimes made up for a lack of technical polish, at least in the dancer's early years.

Working from a screenplay by playwright David Hare, Fiennes treats Nureyev as kind of "it" boy of the dance, a sexually fluid young man who begins to discover the world in Paris, making frequent trips to the Louvre. He also immerses in Parisian nightlife, usually in the company of the young woman (Adele Exarchopoulos) who eventually helps stage Nureyev's defection, which takes place at a Paris airport and constitutes the film's high point.

Fiennes himself makes an appearance as Alexander Pushkin, Nureyev's Leningrad-based instructor who's something of a sad sack, a less-than-charismatic soul. Recovering from an injury, Nureyev moves in with Pushkin. The proximity leads to an affair between Nureyev and Pushkin's wife (Chulpan Khamatova), not exactly the best way for a young dancer to thank his mentor.

The movie gets close to a subject that needed more examination: the complex relationship between Nureyev and a Soviet minder (Aleksey Morozov) who has difficulty reconciling his duties (preventing defections) with Nureyev's free-spirited nature.

Fiennes includes dance sequences that reflect an appreciation of dance by doing what should have been done throughout the entire movie: Dances are mostly presented whole, not chopped into bits that disrupt the narrative flow.

The White Crow also touches on Nureyev's bisexuality. (He died of AIDS in 1993.) And as portrayed by Ivenko, it's clear that Nureyev may have thought that his talent justified his self-involvement. He didn't seem to think much about others.

The movie seems to assume that we already know that Nureyev was a major figure in dance. Lacking, however, is a feeling for the fascination that brought Fiennes to this project in the first place. Too much of the time, The White Crow is a movie without a sense of the imperative.

A young woman's sexual awakening

This Cannes winner takes a frank approach to sex and to an evolving relationship.

Blue is the Warmest Color takes almost three hours, and proceeds at a pace that allows scenes as they will. Among the tributes I can pay the movie is to say that I was never bored by it. I say this not because Blue contains one of the lengthiest, explicitly presented sex scenes in movie history or that this scene is between two women.

I say it because in presenting a love story that revolves around the relationship between a 19-year-old school girl (Adele Exarchopoulos) and an older art student (Lea Seydoux), director Abdellatif Kechiche gives his movie a feeling of real life tumbling before us -- not only in its sex scenes (which, I think, could have been shorter), but in the way the movie deals with Adele's evolving life: from her student years to her days as a primary school teacher.

About those sex scenes:
The movie's sex scenes probably stem from Kechiche's desire to present lesbian sex frankly. And like it or not, sex is at the heart of what has attracted these women to each other.

Still, there's a sense in which the movie's sex scenes are sensationalistic or at least an example of erotic overstatement. Decide for yourself.

Now onto other matters:
If you've seen a picture of Exarchopoulos's face and don't like it, Blue is not the movie for you. Kechiche includes so many close-ups of Adele's face that you'll be able to memorize its every nook and cranny: It's as if he reagrds Exarchopoulos's face as a newly discovered planet, ripe for exploration.

The point, I think, is for Adele's abundant emotions to be reflected on screen. Exarchopoulos allows Adele's thoughts and feelings to ripple across her face without censorial intervention, revealing her character's joys, discoveries and many confusions.

It takes a while to see what Kechiche is after. He's telling a story about the ways in which passionate love often fails to sustain. Ultimately, Adele and Emma are quite different. Emma, the artist, discovers that she craves a stability that's threatened by Adele's always rampant passions.

Early parts of the story focus on Adele's sexual awakening and her realization that she's gay. Emma helps Adele make the leap, but the signs for long-term harmony aren't good. Adele comes from a lower middle-class family; Emma's family is more sophisticated. Think spaghetti dinners vs. oysters on the half shell.

Adele confesses to feeling a constant hunger. She's young, formative and eager to devour the world. Emma's palate already has been educated.

Adele's fascination with Emma reaches obsessional proportions, but she seems to know -- though perhaps not fully -- that her's is a doomed love. At a party thrown by Emma, Adele begins to sense that she's not entirely comfortable around Emma's friends. In the end, it's Adele who may be the more daring of the two. Her sexuality is all-consuming, even threatening. Emma wants to play it safe.

Blue is the Warmest Color won the top prize at last spring's Cannes Film Festival. I don't know if it was the best film at Cannes, but I would say that its rumpled informality exposes two women characters (and I'm not talking nudity here) in ways seldom seen on screen. The movie also has something to say about the difficulty of sustaining relationships between people who may not know themselves as well as they think.

Fair to say: Love and lives in flux can make for an extremely volatile mix.