I love when Black & White (B&W) period pieces use a 1.33 : 1 aspect ratios because the work feels more “real,” whatever the hell that means. “Passing” would not have been less authentic had it been in color or shot widescreen, however, the premise of the screenplay would not have been as believable had we seen Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga’s natural skin color.
And that’s why Negga as “Clare,” a fully passing biracial (African & European ancestry) wife of a prejudiced, racist White banker, was so good’t.
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WE, the People, are in on the secret. 🤫
The audience is IN on the danger. 👀 👀
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The film begins centered on two White women who are shopping at a toy store in New York City. One of the shoppers picks up a pickaninny doll and mistakenly drops it. Irene (Thompson), a biracial (African & European ancestry) woman passing for White, nervously retrieved the doll and hands it to the shopper.
A brilliant way to introduce her character. 👏🏾 👏🏾
I loved the effectiveness of Irene using her hat as a shield while she shopped. By not being able to meet the shoppers’ or the shop’s clerk’s eyes, Irene was able to go about her day with the protection that she could not be made by the folks around her.
But she was cautious.
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The practice of racial passing was a survival technique.
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Irene leaves the shop and takes a cab to a nearby hotel to cool off from a rather steamy late summer/early autumn day. She takes a table in the hotel’s café, again using the brim of her hat to shield her eyeline.
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The camera follows as Irene scans the café while she continues to shield her face. She suddenly locks eyes with a woman she did not immediately recognize.
The staring continued until the woman (Clare) approaches her.
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Irene was flustered as she tried to get away in time. She’s stopped by Clare and realized she knew her—an old childhood friend. She’s flabbergasted!
Clare noticeably made no attempt to shield herself. No hat—nothing. Just comfortable with the idea that she would NEVER be made. She invites Irene up to her hotel room, and then shit gets real.
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“Passing” is based on a 215-paged novel written by Nella Larsen and was published in 1929. Actress/director Rebecca Hall did a great job exploring the depths of race and class, with the lens centered from an upper-class, Black perspective. The daughter of a biracial woman, Hall has recently spoken candidly about her family’s experiences with passing as a means for survival.
I appreciated her directing eye—she captured specific reactions and gradations in tension across the ensemble cast’s performances. I wondered if those moments were more difficult to get because specific tender moments cannot always be articulated in a script.
The repetition of Irene’s walk to her Harlem stoop, the flowery piano score peppered throughout, the reflective shots in mirrors, and close-ups of Irene and Clare’s faces were awesome devices that propelled the narrative.
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The use of mirrors felt like more than just a creative filmmaking decision. It was more of an exploratory, confrontational element. The characters’ reactions to each other were often mirror-focused during tense scenes, even if the camera was not centrally focused on them.
I loved the screenplay’s stretching and bending of Irene’s hypocrisies:
👀 She judged Clare’s decision to exclusively pass as a White woman, but also used the practice when it was convenient and suited her for completing mundane priorities.
👀 She used her privilege to assert an authoritative position in her home. Her sons showed her little respect compared to their father Brian, played by André Holland. Her sons could not choose the level of escapism afforded to their fair-skinned mother when she decided to pass. The weight of their race and the consequences of living freely as affluent Black boys in 1920s Harlem was an experience that was more relatable to that of their father Brain, a respected and well-established community physician. The heaviness of confronting their race was most apparent when Brian attempted to speak candidly about lynching in the South, and Irene tried to spin the narrative. Brian and his sons could not dip in and out of privilege. Even as a doctor, he still had a fine line to walk in his professional and personal life..
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This film, and the novel, is about Irene’s internal conflicts, jealously, and personality. She reckons she can exist as a proud Black woman or a cautious White woman when it best suited her. She found a delicate neutrality in that hypocrisy until Clare turned her world upside down.
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At home where she has “power,” Irene speaks to her darker-hue Black housekeeper condescendingly but is a totally different and less confident person when she’s outside of her Harlem neighborhood. It’s like that repetitive walk we travel with Irene on her way back to Harlem is akin to a sort of strengthening pep talk she needs to transform into a person of authority.
But she crumbles the longer Clare is around.
And why? Because Clare is everything she wished she could be—completely confident that she can exist on either side of the racial line and not be checked. Irene did not want to play into the shadows of her own life. She saw Clare as a threat to her power at home and in her community, and Thompson played that beautifully. The changes in demeanor were subtle, but when they needed to be heightened, you could sense those minute elevations in her fluctuating tone and posture.
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I must say, I love how Alexander Skarsgård, and all the male Skarsgård actors for that matter, continues his reign as an incredible villain. Just fantastic. A “chef’s kiss” performance because that man knows how to get the eyes and cadence in his voice just right. I’m never convinced that he’s acting, and that’s why he’s so good’t at his job. Gold star for the Swedish acting dynasty. ⭐🇸🇪⭐
André Holland is another one who is amazing in any and everything. Give that man two seconds on the screen and he’ll make the most of it. There was one shot of Brian reacting to something Irene said, and I kid you not, me and the two other Black folks in the theater open-mouthed cackled. His expression was so spot on, bruh—just a deep, heavy Negro sigh. We, too, felt how he felt in the moment and his face said it all.
He’s so damn good’t, bruh. 👏🏾👏🏾😝 More of him in things, please Hollywood.
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Producing this film in B&W was THEE only option but I’m almost certain it was not simplistic feat. Wardrobe and makeup needed to be on top of it to make certain scenes made sense with lighting manipulations and color. I’d think contrast and sharpness were the biggest hurdles.
The two main characters’ skin tones are foci, but probably a lot more for Clare than for Irene as the film progresses. Playing into the lightness or darkness of Irene or Clare’s hues, and how lighting was applied, played differently depending on who they’d share the scene with.
When Clare welcomed Irene up to her hotel room during the film’s introduction and her husband John (Skarsgård) walks in, both Irene and Clare’ skin color needed to be as pale as possible in that scene. Racial passing while in front of an openly racist John hoping to not be made is the tension. And the danger.
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There are too few films that narrate the progressions and shifts in the practice of racial passing. Though the finale was a bit abrupt, I believe (if I’m remembering correctly) it mirrors Larsen’s writing and punctuates the tension, drama, and ambiguity of the event’s truth—a Shakespearian tragedy.
I noted that during the final scenes outside the apartment building when the police tried to get to the truth of the tragedy, they had completely disregarded what the group of Black partygoers, including Brian, were describing. They had heard John’s side, as he sat in anguish apart from the rest of the group. As Irene appeared from the lobby of the building, she’s approached for the definitive truth.
Oh, how familiar a tradition…🙄🙄
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As a break from standard, I’ll add a bit of my personal history to this narrative about the history of racial passing. I enjoyed this film’s breakdown of racial passing and how the consequences of this dangerous survival tactic manifested.
It was commonplace.
My paternal grandfather was a stationed in Europe during the 1950s after WWII, and probably earlier too, iontreallyknow. 🤷🏾♀️🤷🏾♀️ He died a few years before I was born, and I was his first granddaughter out of seven grandchildren. (And apparently, apropos of nothing at all, I inherited a rare heterochromia iridum—or iris scarring—from him. Shouts to him, I guess, my baby eyes are in an early-90s ophthalmology book somewhere.)
Throughout my life, I heard stories about how fair his skin tone was, with the joke that he was “so light…he was clear” and effortlessly passed as a White man. But I never really saw that in photographs. In the B&W, sepia, and fully colorized pictures I had seen, he was obviously Black. I remember saying to my father about his father, “…who really believed that he was not colored…seriously?” I was under the impression that I could always tell when someone passed for White or Black.
There’s this misconception that most lighter-hued Black folks are biracial, which is obviously not true. It is also not true that all Black and White biracial persons have lighter skin tones. (The science of genetics be whooping ass outchea, especially for the shawties who do not comprehend the differences between race, ethnicity, and nationality. We all gotta start somewhere but miss me, please.)
I, like most other Black folks, have different shades of Black, brown and non-brown in my lineage. Only recently have I learned the names of the slave and slaveowner my paternal family’s namesake comes from.
To me, a dark brown-hued Black girl who had experienced the ugliness of colorism for most of my adolescence, I saw a regular-degular-schmegular Black man in my grandfather’s photographs. But then I realized I was mostly finding photos of him in his older years, harkening back to the vile joke nickname John gives to Clare about her changing skin tone as she aged.
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Oh, but bih…I rummaged through older photo albums of a younger pop-pop.
And bih, I found one filled with postcards my grandmother kept from his time overseas before and after they got married… and y’all. I saw it.
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Pictured above is a “U.S. Government Operator’s Permit” issued to my grandfather in 1954.
“Sex—Male;” “Race—Cau“…
I flipped through the album and there were hundreds of photos of him living, care-fucking-free, in all-White barracks, laughing it up and drinking in all-White mess halls.
SIR! 😂 😂 😂
Y’all.
I wish I had the capacity to find any person living who was in the “12th Inf Regt.” and knew my grandfather well enough during that time. Oh, the questions I’d ask! The ideas running through my mind of what he must have been thinking throughout this time knowing that parts of his own family were prejudiced toward Black folks when they were Negros themselves!
Whew! The ways I wish I could time travel sometimes.
That might be the subject of my first film. Get Wentworth Miller of “Prison Break” and Mariah Carey’s music video eye candy from her “The Emancipation of Mimi” phase to play my grandfather.
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In all, I’d recommend the film. There’s interesting and relatable content for all. It’s a great conversation piece, and a fantastic debut for Hall—I can’t wait to see what she does next.