The American filmmaker Ira Sachs (57 years old) is not afraid of expressing his opinion or breaking taboos. It is one of the motivations that prompted him to shoot Passages, his latest film, released in Spanish theaters this Friday. “I wanted to make a horny and erotic film about sex, desire, skin and beauty,” she confesses in an interview with EL PAÍS by video call. He has launched into many topics: bisexuality, infidelity, greed and orgasms. He has a lot of that Passages.
The most conventional films bore him because they do not feature sexual intercourse: “Superheroes don’t have sex, so they don’t represent the human experience.” He believes that these types of scenes are not included because it is a “dangerous element if you want to create a mass product.” But, at the same time, he underlines the capacity of the erotic as an element of marketing. For example, with the notices given by the platforms at the beginning of each film: “They tell you: ‘Don’t worry, there is going to be sex and drugs in this film, you are in the right place,” she ironically. To invent the plot of Passages, the filmmaker has had to delve into old films and directors like Pedro Almodóvar, who bet on the idea that showing skin and bodies is fine.
Sachs’ stories always revolve around family and couple issues, told from the insides of the characters and their emotions. They are everyday problems that happen to characters who are not. This is the case of Tomás, a film director who falls in love with a young woman and is unfaithful to her husband. For Sachs, love complicates the world and, along with “family,” is the hardest word to define. “It’s trying to understand how two humans interact together,” she explains.
An “action” movie
Passages It is not a romantic tragedy —although it is a clear example to differentiate between falling in love and being infatuated—, but an “action movie”. This is how the director defines it, because his characters are looking for something more than a love relationship, they are ambitious. A quality that makes the protagonist more of an antihero than a hero. “The history of the drama is full of heroes who are not perfect. or was it andShakespeare’s King Lear?” he says. Tomas is a tormented man for whom things get more complicated with each step he takes until he ends up with nothing. Sachs’s goal is that: for the powerful man to end up crawling on the ground. “My motivation is having lived under the Trump government, he was desperate to take it down from the pedestal,” he says. And the viewer hopes that the same will happen to Tomás.
When talking about power, Sachs uses a much more combative tone, probably as a defense. He has been able to dodge censorship in many countries, but he is scandalized by the recent cases of cancellations of shows in Spain or by the withdrawal of children’s films. lightyear, where a kiss between two women comes out. “The far right doesn’t care what individual people do, they just want to show their power. And one way to do that is to teach her ability to be violent,” she comments.
It also rejects the rating of films by age: Passages has entered the category of not recommended for children under 17 in the US, its possible commercial death. “It’s a way to warn other directors that they don’t create this type of imaginary because they won’t reach the entire public.”
He not only thinks about the people who oppose, also about those who are silent. “All the LGBT directors that have existed have remained over time because they have stopped telling gay stories since the industry and culture are not there to support them,” she says. In his opinion, plots with this perspective have no place in film competitions. “The festivals have seized on the power of the white man and they tell us not to question them,” he says when he brings up the attitude of Thierry Frémaux, general delegate of Cannes, when the actress Adèle Haenel published an open letter criticizing the festival for programming films by directors accused of sexual assault such as Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. “With everything that has been achieved, did we really decide to fight so that these two men have their visibility space?”, she protests. And that the festivals have been key in his career, especially the one at Sundance, where it premiered Passages earlier this year, in addition to some of his previous feature films. The key for him to defend this quote is those responsible for him. “Sundance has, from the beginning, a culture that embraces the different,” he says.
Sachs’ cinema, and this film even more, plays with silences. It is the director’s way of expressing his freedom as an artist. “Within the silence there is ambiguity, something that is very precious in the seventh art but that is not allowed in the most commercial industry”, he defends. But, in addition, the blank spaces produce anguish. The film leads the viewer through a state of constant tension.
The son of divorced parents, homosexual and Jewish, Sachs belongs to more than one minority group and does not feel like leaving the cinema or keeping quiet. His life motto is a declaration of intent. “If I could give my children any kind of training, I think it would be the one Martin Scorsese had in 1940 in New York; that is to say: everything is possible ”, he reflects.
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