‘Passages’: Why Ira Sachs Made the Horniest Film of the Year
“I had sex with a woman. Can I please talk with you about it?”
With that, writer-director Ira Sachs launches his audience into Passages, his new tangled-web wonder: an erotic, sexy-as-hell, mind-meld of a film that’s at once a wet-dream masterpiece about passion, a psycho-torture nightmare about the complexities of connection and intimacy, and, above all, an absolute riot.
Its premiere at Sundance in January sent festivalgoers into the Park City snow to cool off. Its unrated release in theaters this past weekend, after Sachs rejected the MPAA’s NC-17 rating, emboldened its fierce champions (critics gave the film a 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes approval) to recommend the film even more feverishly.