In the past five years, three movies of great distinction have challenged, in subtle and profound ways, our notions of who gets to speak for whom, especially when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality. In 2016, Barry Jenkins, a straight Black filmmaker, directed “Moonlight,” a landmark movie about Black gay life. Three years later, Trey Edward Shults, a white director, wrote and directed “Waves,” an extraordinary study of the dissolution of one middle-class Black family. And last month, at the Sundance Film Festival, the actress Rebecca Hall premièred “Passing,” her directing début (she also wrote the screenplay), which is based on Nella Larsen’s uncanny, tightly structured 1929 novel about Black female friendship, mirroring, deception, and class privilege. (“Passing” will stream on Netflix in the fall.)
Hall, working with the cinematographer Eduard Grau, uses black-and-white film, overhead closeups, and other visual motifs to create a kind of cinematic fugue that explores and reëxplores the minds of the childhood friends Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga) and Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) as they struggle with social demands and the excruciating emotional fakery that can inform Black upward mobility. This nervous world, which Hall frames with classical authority—her medium shots are tranquil, regardless of a scene’s emotional violence—makes us nervous, too, because what is being said and enacted within it may have little to do with the truth, or what is accepted as the truth. “Passing” is a sort of moral noir, a movie about performance, about how women put on their female drag to please, annoy, flirt with, and provoke one another.
When it was announced, a couple of years ago, that Hall was adapting Larsen’s novel for the screen, I didn’t think, What’s this white woman doing with Larsen? but, rather, That makes sense, given the range and depth of Hall’s own performances. (She brought real melancholy to Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” in 2008, and blew me away as the vulnerable, unhinged protagonist of Antonio Campos’s 2016 film, “Christine.”) Besides, great art makes a hash of doctrine, and if Hall felt that she had something to say about Larsen’s book she should be allowed to say it. Where would we be without Forest Whitaker’s performance as Erie, in the 2016 Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie,” a character O’Neill presumably wrote for a white actor? Where would we be without Jeffrey Wright embodying his idea of Abraham Lincoln in the 2001 Public Theatre production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog”? Or without the Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief dancing the Swan Queen in Balanchine’s 1951 take on “Swan Lake”? How much poorer would you and I be had Gloria Foster not portrayed Clytemnestra in Andrei Serban’s 1977 staging of “Agamemnon” at Lincoln Center, or had David Greenspan not played the sheep in the 2013 Off Broadway production of David Adjmi’s “Marie Antoinette”? Where would we be if these people had never tried to inhabit a world in which there were no limits to their various real and fictional selves? I hoped for Hall, as I hope for anyone who risks making art at all.
In a way, “Passing” is Hall’s coming-out film. The child of the British theatre director Peter Hall and the American soprano Maria Ewing, Hall grew up in an environment where telling stories was the family business. So many legends. One concerned the racial identity of Hall’s maternal grandfather. A light-skinned Black man, he married a white woman and appears to have spent his adult life passing as white; his daughter, Hall’s mother, did the same. It wasn’t until Hall was in her mid-twenties, and spending more time in the U.S., that she began to reflect on the issue—and that was when she first read “Passing.”
Who can say what history lies under white skin? Or Black? This is one of the questions that Hall’s film asks. Another is: What makes a performance? Passing is itself a performance that follows the same rules as acting: the actor decides whom to play, and then makes the fiction real with the help of a script, costume, deportment, as the audience, white and Black, looks on, approving or disapproving.
The so-called white-male gaze is everywhere and nowhere in Larsen’s novel. When the book opens, it’s the twenties, and Irene Redfield, the light-skinned wife of a successful dark-skinned doctor, is sitting in her Harlem house reading her mail. She discovers a letter from a woman named Clare Kendry; the name is like a bad dream become reality. In flashback, we meet Irene and Clare as girls in Chicago. Clare is quiet and cunning, always intent on her own pleasure. She longs for nice clothes—costuming to belie her tawdry existence. After her brutish white father is killed in a fight, the waif goes to live with his relatives, and Irene loses track of her. (Larsen tells us that Clare’s mother, a Black woman, has died, but that’s all we know about her. In this book filled with absences, the absence of maternal love is only one of many things that Clare has to endure.)
Twelve years later, on a scorchingly hot day, Irene, in need of refreshment, lets a cabdriver ferry her to a hotel in Chicago where Blacks are not allowed. She doesn’t tell the driver or any of the hotel staff that she’s Black; her light skin carries the day. It’s the first time that she has used her skin tone to cross racial lines. The secret feels awful—and delicious. No sooner has she settled in, though, than someone recognizes her. It’s Clare. The women exchange pleasantries. Clare is living in Europe now; her husband has business in Chicago, and she and her little girl came along. Does Irene have children? Yes, two boys. Larsen, with her skill for the specific and the surreal, has Clare and Irene sit and converse like figures in a hallucination framed by race; they are performing women sharing details, not sharing themselves.
Irene learns about her old friend’s life with her father’s sisters. Religious and pious, they never forgave their brother for having “ruined” a Negro girl. Clare was the unfortunate evidence of that misalliance. Eventually, the crafty young woman attached herself to Jack Bellew, a white man from the neighborhood who had come back from a trip to South America “with untold gold.” Jack didn’t know about Clare’s heritage, and she didn’t tell him. Married to a white man, she was granted access to the finer things in life that she had always craved. “You’d be surprised, ’Rene, how much easier [it] is with white people,” she says. “Maybe because there are so many more of them, or maybe because they are secure and so don’t have to bother. I’ve never quite decided.”
When Clare speaks, it’s as if she were showing off a luxury item during a time of deprivation. To counteract that feeling, Irene brings up the Lord and ethics. (Larsen’s characters can never set aside their differences, which is to say their friction-filled doubling.) And yet Irene is mesmerized by Clare’s blond hair, her beautiful shoulders, her languor. What’s so striking about this exchange—and a subsequent one that Clare and Irene have with another friend, Gertrude, whose husband is white, and who is horrified to learn that Irene married a Black man and has a dark-skinned child—is how passing itself becomes a kind of race, with its own codes of behavior, carefully drawn lines, and exclusions.
Larsen was a distinctly literary writer, and to read her small but unforgettable body of work is to be reminded of other exemplary stylists—Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles come to mind—who, through art and vision, made their America as queer as Larsen made hers. Part of her queerness has to do with her fascination with the erotic lives of women. Hall shares that fascination: she’s as interested in Clare and Irene as they are in each other’s bodies and style. (The film’s costumes are by Marci Rodgers, who, thank God, doesn’t make the nineteen-twenties look as though they’d been filtered through the twenty-twenties.) Hall sets her story entirely in New York, when the women are adults. In this way, she makes it clear that she wants us to sit, from the get-go, in the nightmare of the now.
When we first see Irene, she’s wearing a wide-brimmed summer hat. We look at her, through the nearly transparent brim, as she, in turn, looks out at the world—tentatively, secretly. She’s in a store that caters to a white clientele. The camera follows her as she stealthily navigates the space; she’s a spy in a world of whiteness, and we are her co-conspirators. When she steps outside, everything seems bleached by the sun. Indeed, the film’s early scenes are blasted by whiteness, like photographic paper in a developing tray, moments before the black begins to show.
The whites become slightly modulated, a little grayer, when Irene, after having tea at the hotel, accompanies Clare to her room. There, an amazing scene of seduction and resistance takes place. Clare asks Irene to help her as she changes her dress. The light fabric flutters on Clare’s shoulders, below her blond hair, and the camera zeroes in on these moments of closeness and reserve, as though we the viewers were part of the charged, scented atmosphere. Negga’s Clare is aware of her effect—she’s as turned on by her duality as Irene is—and New York seems only to ramp up her excitement. But, just as Irene feels herself being drawn in, she pulls back: Clare is mesmerizing, but to lose control would mean losing hold of everything Irene has fought to achieve—a siddity Black life that combines order with moral correctness.
Nevertheless, Irene can’t look away from Clare, and neither can we. Negga’s performance is one of the film’s astonishments. By turns pleading and bitchy, mean and porous, Clare slithers around Irene’s sensitivities like a snake curious about the taste of its own poison. And Thompson, as Irene, experiences this intimacy, laced with competitiveness and desire, with a confusion that is not theatrical but true to her character. Irene’s instinct is to underplay her own existence in deference to her responsibilities: family and the demands of being a bourgeois member of society. Still, the women, as scripted by Larsen and Hall, speak the same language: stilted, stylized, “polite” talk that says nothing as it hints at everything. In fact, language is the bridge between Clare’s white world and Irene’s Black one.
After Irene returns home to Harlem, Hall’s palette becomes darker. Irene’s skin is dark, the wooden bannister leading down to the kitchen is dark, the maid, Zu (the excellent Ashley Ware Jenkins), is very dark, and so are Dr. Redfield’s eyes, hair, and suits. Redfield (André Holland) wants to move to South America, where he believes there is no racial prejudice. He longs for a world away from this segregated society, where even Blacks judge you by your skin color, and your life is defined by how you look, not by how you are. But Redfield gets on Irene’s nerves as much as Clare does, especially once she starts showing up at Irene’s house and insinuating herself into her daily life. Clare is trying to find her way back to Blackness, or back to the mother we know so little about, and she can do it only with Irene, another Black mother, as her guide. Over time, Irene is filled with an anger that she cannot express—until the film’s devastating and enigmatic ending.
As those final scenes played out, I was reminded of two other important works that touch on this subject: Douglas Sirk’s movie “Imitation of Life” (1959) and the artist Adrian Piper’s 1985 photography and text piece “A Tale of Avarice and Poverty.” Sirk was German-born and white, and Piper, who has settled in Berlin, is an American with African ancestry, but both creators seem to reach similar conclusions: dreams of being free and white, and thus powerful, don’t free you; they only exacerbate your feverish, specious longing to become a citizen of a kind of no man’s land, in which no one can rest, least of all you. Clare and Irene want to belong—but to what? To the other’s idea of what makes a person white or Black? And where does their fever come from? The head? The heart? The ground beneath their American feet?
When Hall was a girl, Salome was one of her mother’s great roles, and Ewing would appear nude in “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Performers often use characters and metaphors to reveal something of themselves, and this was a way of being seen, certainly. To my knowledge, Billie Holiday didn’t undress onstage, but she was naked anyway. Part of the tremendous energy in her projected cool was put toward finding a form for that nakedness—a “miracle of pure style,” the essayist Elizabeth Hardwick called it—which told us not so much who she was, clothed or unclothed, as what she was, and what we were, too, and why. Looking for the truth of experience didn’t limit Holiday to that truth; I doubt whether she would have had much patience for the who-gets-to-speak-for-whom discussion. (As a child, she was known for being what one observer called “don’t-careish.”) Indeed, in her humanism, she knew that the best stories are less often the ones that directly reflect your own experience than the ones shot through with other experiences that you can mine for art. Just listen to her version of “My Yiddishe Momme,” say, and you’ll understand that you don’t need to have grown up with that mother to know what a dream of maternal love feels like, and how it can be a kind of sustenance, even when it’s a wound.
As an artist and a woman, Holiday belonged to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier described as lo real maravilloso (“the marvellous real”)—that which cannot be explained but is irrefutably here. I don’t want you to spend too much time on Lee Daniels’s new movie about Holiday, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (on Hulu), because you won’t find much of Billie Holiday in it—and certainly not the superior intelligence of a true artist. What you’ll find instead is an illustration of the nasty impulses that spell out Daniels’s interest in degradation. A co-creator of the Fox series “Empire” and the director of such deep-fried-chicken-and-pain movies as “Precious” (2009), Daniels has emerged as a skewed moralist, one who, although he is Black, seems to feel that most Black people are both power-mad and powerless, and therefore fodder to be pimped out, debased, and manipulated. (Full disclosure: in the late nineties, I wrote a script about Holiday that Daniels and several other producers were interested in at the time.)
Adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks from a nonfiction book by Johann Hari, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is Daniels’s response to Sidney J. Furie’s “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972), in which Diana Ross portrayed the singer. It’s also a bid to win the Best Actress Oscar—which Ross lost to Liza Minnelli—for Daniels’s own star, the singer Andra Day. Furie showed physical and drug abuse relatively sparingly in “Lady Sings the Blues,” but Daniels’s movie explodes in an orgy of violence, sex, and shallow, predictable behavior. He can’t get enough of such things because, after all, these are Black characters, and Daniels sees the world through the kind of white gaze that Hall, for one, questions and dismantles.
Less than a half hour into this interminable flick, Holiday, who has been getting high with a guy named Joe (Melvin Gregg), says that she wants some ice cream. Joe is too far gone to move, so Holiday, in her undergarments, puts on his overcoat and is about to go out for the sweets herself when the fuzz storms in, led by a Black federal agent, Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), who, earlier, came on strong as one of Holiday’s admiring fans. While other agents handcuff Joe, Fletcher tells Holiday that the cops will be along to search her, and you wonder why he doesn’t do it himself. The answer: it would preëmpt the self-conscious drama of the following scene. Holiday, furious, calls Fletcher a “lying Black son of a bitch,” and flings off the coat, and then her undergarments, to show that she has nothing to hide, not even her tough, battered vulnerability. The scene is dead at heart because Day is not an actress and what she’s been asked to do doesn’t come from anywhere internal. The moment, like so many in the movie, is about Holiday being a bad bitch, high on her own humiliation and that other narcotic—show business.
Day is beautiful to look at, but she has no center as a performer. Her presence is a series of postures and imitative voice techniques that serve only to further etch the image of junkie mess into this portrait of a great artist who changed an art form. The movie feels like a revenge number on Blackness and whiteness—an expression of the white-power fantasy in which Black artists always lose, because Blackness is trash, or, at least, gets trashed, right here in its own back yard. ♦
