Fran Magazine: Issue #75

On watching Passages and Red, White, and Royal Blue on the same day

Aug 23, 2023

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Maestro moment

I can’t afford to update you with the same degree of dedication towards press updates for Bradley Cooper’s forthcoming film Maestro as I did last week, but suffice it to say I can spare a few thoughts here and there. Namely, after scheduling and publishing last week’s issue, the Bernstein family put out a statement defending the use of the prosthetic nose.

Bradley Cooper included the three of us along every step of his amazing journey as he made his film about our father. We were touched to the core to witness the depth of his commitment, his loving embrace of our father's music, and the sheer open-hearted joy he brought to his exploration. It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts. It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we're perfectly fine with that. We're also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well. Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch -- a practice we observed all too often perpetrated on our own father.

At all times during the making of this film, we could feel the profound respect and yes, the love that Bradley brought to his portrait of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, our mother Felicia. — this was released via the @LennyBernstein Twitter account, lol

If you haven’t read the statement, it’s both very touching and deeply funny. It also cements Maestro’s place in the 2023-2024 awards season discourse cycle (as if the mostly bad faith nose conversation didn’t already). All I’m saying is, pace yourself in the months ahead, drink water, get plenty of sleep.

Bisexual double feature

On Saturday, Phil and I went to go see Passages, and then later that night, we watched Red, White, and Royal Blue: two movies about one insane “bisexual” guy causing havoc in an international sort of way. They made for great bedfellows (or double feature, as you might say), a glimpse into the “romantic” “comedy” ([who weekly voice] “promising young promising young woman woman”) landscape. Neither of these films is a romantic comedy in the conventional sense — not because of the fact they are same-sex, to be clear, but each exists at the opposite end of the romantic comedy spectrum. Passages is, for all intents and purposes, a “European” movie made by an American director, one that feels, if nothing else, most in line with other European films in an almost satirical sort of way. The other is a brash mainstream-ification, for lack of a better word1 , of what would otherwise be a Lifetime or Hallmark-style romantic comedy.

Passages, which is playing nationwide now (I believe), is the latest from director Ira Sachs, a filmmaker responsible for two of my favorite films from the 2012s: Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016). His latest tells the story of a love triangle in Paris: a filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski, weaponized) and his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw, never better) begins an affair with a local school teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), I know a lot of people to whom something like this has or will happen/ed to). In a more didactic and probably worse movie, this would prompt a conversation about passion, sexuality, boundaries, exploration. In the hands of Sachs, however, the focus is almost exclusively on the narcissism of Tomas, who must be loved and adored at all costs, whose love and adoration comes at a heavy price. He flits through Paris and the country eager for attention from anyone who will have him. It’s amazing he kept a marriage going this long. He is an “emotional terrorist” and “toxic,” and probably, despite what the film shows us, a good filmmaker. The sex is graphic and compelling, earning the movie is a handwringing NC-17 before it pivoted to being “unrated.”

I know an almost equal number of people who like and dislike Passages. I saw at virtual Sundance a great many months ago on my television in my living room where I admired the movie but did not particularly enjoy it. What few, perhaps, are talking about in the parochial conversation about the necessity of sex scenes and its funky costume design is that it is probably the best-looking movie released in theaters this year. Prior to watching, I’d heard Passages was really hot; then I heard it was actually really funny. I’m not sure I thought it was either on the initial go-around. My friend Austin pointed out that Sachs makes movies either warm or cold; this one is pretty cold. And for a moment, it felt like what was so funny about Passages in its initial reception was that it’s plot consisted of events that would be breathlessly reiterated across four to six voice memos. It is not that the movie felt cruel, necessarily, but it did leave me feeling particularly bad on first watch. It’s not that I felt Tomas needed to be narratively punished or anything so moral, but it is exhausting to spend 90 minutes with someone behaving so callously.

On rewatch, however, I found the whole affair much lighter and funnier; it helped, I’m sure, to be watching with a small audience at IFC. The costumes were more outrageous, the brashness of the dialogue felt that much more rude. I was also happy to have spent a few months earlier in the year discussing the film: Tessa had seen a screening with Sachs in attendance in LA, who likened his wayward protagonist to Buster Keaton’s willingness to throw himself into stunts but in a psychosexual sort of way. That, in tandem with my own hindsight, lent a much more enjoyable experience. We aren’t really supposed to take Tomas as an ironic representation of what, like, “chaotic LGBTQs are like,” so much as we are supposed to see the folly in his misguided optimism. Passages would make for a good double feature with Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In — a movie in which Juliette Binoche plays the most heartsick, dedicated, and delusional single woman of all time.

Instead, however, we paired Passages with Red, White, and Royal Blue, the direct-to-Amazon Prime adaptation of the Casey McQuiston novel of the same title that imagines the American first son (Taylor Zakhar Perez) and the British spare prince (Nicholas Galitzine) fall in love. To get it out of the way, Red, White, and Royal Blue is not a good movie. The performances are not good. It is not engaging to look at. It is too long. The most compelling thing about it is how it uses texting and emailing on the screen, but doesn’t that kind of just make you want to read a book? Still: it is a fascinating cultural object. Every other day on whatever social media site you use, you will see someone lament the lack of the romcom. Who is our Nora Ephron? Where is our Forgetting Sarah Marshall? We have this, to be clear, it didn’t go anywhere: it is just now shit like this, largely unfunny and extremely direct in tone. What is fascinating, perhaps, in all of this is watching a film about men so directly engaging with the female fantasy of a male relationship: this is effectively an adaptation of an epistolary novel, two men falling in love with each other over texting and email. There are rumors that Red, White, and Royal Blue originated as fanfic (though tough to find any actual confirmation of that — sound off if you know the fandom, though). So too did 50 Shades of Gray, a piece of romantic fiction more erotic in nature than Red, White, and Royal Blue, but that also spends much of its time focusing on emails. These are books in which love is a contract! Not mere negotiations of enthusiastic consent, or whatever, but stories in which every action in the relationship is forecast is great detail over Gmail.

they should have made Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw pose like this

I did not like Red, White, and Royal Blue, though it did make me feel completely insane and a bit nostalgic for the Bros wars of last year. I wonder if the poor box office performance of Bros led to the straight-to-streaming result of Red, White, and Royal Blue, which — I truly believe — would have made a killing in the August box office. I wrote about Bros last year and its complete lack of danger. Bros is so intent on justifying its own existence that it’s not really ever clear to me why these two guys like each other at all. Red, White, and Royal Blue, however, is all danger: these guys can never be together! Their parents are diplomats/politicians/useless figureheads! They can’t negotiate what they want out of a relationship or ever have a legitimate good time without remembering that their parents are diplomats/politicians/useless figureheads! I guess my issue with Red, White, and Royal Blue is that the stakes are too high, but they are so joylessly too high. Phil rather adeptly pointed out that the movie is almost entirely without hijinks. No one is really having fun, narratively. A relationship like this is, for better and worse, the end of the world. I was having a lot of fun with the first half of Red, White, and Royal Blue, but its second half is speech after speech after speech after speech. McQuiston has more or less gone on the record saying she wrote the book to bring comfort to her younger queer self that grew up in a conservative, Christian home. If only she was more intent on bringing a little humor to that comfort, rather than constant reassurance.

Passages, too, is all danger, but in the best possible way: a constant state of risk and reward (and punishment) for everyone who gets involved. These things should be messy! They should be the equivalent of having cake smeared on a tux, of having to issue a, like, United Nations kind of apology. Or at least, they should be really funny. Neither of these gets that far, but one of them gets way closer.

One more thought

I always think about Brian Feldman’s old piece for New York Mag about people who discover older or formerly more popular songs from pop culture and then flock to the YouTube comments to announce this. He wrote this specifically in response to “Heaven is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle in the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero,” but obviously this happens all the time. I was curious to know if “Get Low” inspired the same frantic YouTube search after its appearance in Red, White, and Royal Blue2 — like, do Gen Z and below know this song?

…

…….

Mostly yes! The comments are flooded with “I am getting old but this song is still good!!!!” and then, of course, a handful of: