The movie’s premise is potentially a titillating one for a certain kind of white viewer who may hope to see the drama of racial strife played out on a grand scale the number of times directors have remade Imitation of Life, adapted from white writer Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, indicates as much.
Passing is a ghost story, and it’s unclear if Clare is even real to herself. But it’s Irene’s crescendoing despair, and an internal pain that begins to beam out as a kind of paranoia, that push the film fragilely forward. Brian, a doctor, is suspicious of Clare, and wary of her effect on his family. Clare’s husband John Bellew ( Alexander Skarsgård) is a jovial racist who takes Irene, and of course his own wife, for white. Much of the film inches on quietly, with words, looks, and movements accruing over the course of public and domestic exchanges between the women and their spouses. Irene/Reenie is flustered and excited-then, over the course of their re-connection, discomfited and disturbed. “It’s me! Clare!” Irish actress Ruth Negga plays her with her large, inquiring eyes serving as both a form of assertion and protection, constantly reading the situation. This glamorous, mysterious lady approaches with a glint in her eye. But what the white people in the film see-what even Reenie sees, for several moments-is a white woman. “Reenie?” What we see, as the audience, is another light-skinned Black woman recognizing her own. A pale, blonde woman flirting with nearly everybody across a dining room makes eye contact. This time, though, she doesn’t make it back before being spotted. But when she goes home to Harlem, to her darker-skinned husband, Brian ( Moonlight and The Eddy’s André Holland) and very dark-skinned sons, she’s Black again. At the beginning of the film, a light-skinned woman, Irene Redfield ( Tessa Thompson), passes for white while doing her daily errands in New York City’s Upper East Side. The film, adapted by Rebecca Hall from Black writer Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name and shot entirely in black and white, embodies the close reading-not necessarily of text, but of gestures and attitudes-that became crucial for Black survival under American chattel slavery, during Reconstruction, and thereafter.
You can’t say that Passing, currently in theaters and on Netflix November 10, is either coming or going.
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