A Fiercely Independent Voice Powers Through

Ira Sachs has big questions to ask with his new movie, Passages. Not just the questions brought up in the film, about a gay couple (Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw) who fall apart when one of them pursues an affair with a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The film has been critically acclaimed since it debuted at Sundance at the beginning of this year, with our own critic Richard Lawsonpraising it as a “a biting and literate pleasure” with a “sophisticated approach to romance.” But Passages is now in theaters with a big asterisk, an NC-17 rating handed down by the MPAA, an organization Sachs is now asking us to reconsider. “It seems to me the simple question that we should be asking ourselves as a community of filmmakers and artists and an industry is why do we still follow a set of rules that were created in the 1920s by the Catholic Church and the Hays Code?” he tells David Canfield on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast. “Why? Why is this still in place?”

It’s not the first time Sachs has been targeted by the ratings board. His 2014 film, Love Is Strange, a tender and distinctly non-explicit love story about a gay couple played by Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, received an R rating, with plenty of its defenders pointing to homophobia as the reason. Given the frank gay sex scene in Passages, it’s not hard to guess that the same logic has struck again. But Sachs is also undaunted; his distributor, Mubi, is releasing Passagesunrated, and the film is finding its audience, as many of Sachs’s films have done against some seriously daunting odds. As he explains on Little Gold Men,the 2008 recession made it exceedingly difficult to make independent films, to the point that a project he had set up with stars like Michael Shannon and Kirsten Dunst completely fell apart. But he’s powered through, making gems like Little Men and Frankie that have established him as a singular voice in independent film, no matter the challenges in getting there.   Hear more from Ira Sachs on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast. Passages is in theaters now and will be streaming on Mubi later this year.

With the Sexy Passages, Ira Sachs Reminds Why He’s an Essential Indie Voice

The acclaimed writer-director went outside the US to make his latest movie—the latest example of an industry veteran determined to make his art his way.

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