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At a ball in 1920s Harlem, a fair-skinned Black woman, Irene Redfield, watched another woman with blonde hair as she danced with Irene’s brown husband. There is something about this woman, Clare, that one of Irene’s white voyeuristic guests says he can’t quite put his finger on. Irene tells him, “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

There lies the crux of Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut and film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel “Passing,” both narratively and aesthetically. As far as adaptations go, “Passing” is a brilliant one. Hall, along with performances from Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga and cinematographer Eduard Grau, bring the essence of Larsen’s novel to life.

In the film, as well as the novel, Irene Redfield’s life starts to unravel when an old friend thought to be long gone, Clare Kendry, comes back into her life one hot summer day in New York City. Both women are fair enough to pass as white. But while Irene chooses to live as a Black woman – marrying a visibly Black man, raising their visibly Black children and building community among the Black upper middle class – Clare has chosen to live her life as a white woman. Clare is married to a white man who jokingly, and cruelly, calls her “Nig” because her skin has started to darken in the years since they married. Still, he remains oblivious of her transgression of the color line.

Whereas other films have shot in all black and white to lend themselves an artistic and cultural cache that’s often unearned – vibes and aesthetics without substance – “Passing’s” black-and-white visuals have a purpose. The ambiguous racial identities of Irene and Clare, of which I’d argue are only ambiguous to those not intimately familiar with the wide range of complexions and features of Black people, undermine the clear-cut binary of the black-and-white images the film presents to us as the audience.

This aesthetic choice therefore prompts the audience to approach the images as well as the racialized and gendered facades that Irene and Clare both present to others with skepticism. The black-and-white cinematography emphasizes the complexities of race as a construct with real consequences. In the absence of flesh-toned skin colors, audiences must acknowledge how race is performed by both white and Black people. Like Irene said, “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

Watching the film, you’ll notice that Hall and Grau have framed the women in the boxy aspect ratio of 4:3 instead of the 16:9 aspect ratio we’re used to, a masterful choice that visually translates Larsen’s third person limited narrative point of view in the novel. It gives Irene an unreliable subjectivity without the narration we’d get reading the book.

I won’t reveal the tragic and ambiguously subjective ending to the film or the novel here, but just know that the square look and the visual restrictions and constraints it creates is used to great effect in the final scene.

The aspect ratio shows the constraints of Irene’s life as a polished, respectable doctor’s wife and mother working toward uplifting the race. In one frame, Irene sits on the stairs inside her Harlem brownstone, the wood bars on the staircase appearing as prison bars, the walls of the home seem to cave in on her. The frame literally boxes her in.

Although Irene claims she is satisfied with her life, the film’s visuals and her confessions to Clare, in which she agrees motherhood is the “cruelest thing in the world,” suggest otherwise. Perhaps she isn’t content with her adherence to a code of respectability politics many upper-middle class Black women lived by the time, giving up sexual agency and freedom for the sake of proving to whites that Black people weren’t inferior or transgressive.

With Clare walking back into her life, Irene is forced to reckon with how living up to white, hetereonormative middle class values has left her wanting more. The film offers a deeper excavation of passing that intersects racial passing with class, gender and sexuality.

Narratively, “Passing” is all about performance. How is race performed? How are whiteness and Blackness performed? In this regard the central actresses’ performances are crucial. The subtlety and intricacies of Thompson’s and Negga’s performances as Irene and Clare, respectively, are so simultaneously magnetic and intriguing. Their facial expressions, lingering and piercing gazes, a brushing of the hands together, a slight tilt of the head as if to hide but not to cause suspicion are subtext for what’s not being said.

Instead of the white mask, Black skin metaphor, I’d say they make themselves puzzles to be solved by each other and the audience. Irene and Clare’s desires for each other’s lives become intertwined with their desire for each other. Each performs heteronormativity, so their sexual desire or romantic feelings masquerade as friendship. Again, things aren’t always what they seem, and the veiled truth is more complicated than a black or white, hetereosexual or homoerotic binary.

Ultimately, “Passing” is the rare adaptation that not only matches the intensity, complexity and brilliant thematic and aesthetic interrogations of the novel but also adds something new to our understanding and interpretation of the original work in its crossover into cinema.

Published on November 16, 2021 at 10:39 pm

Contact Madison: mntyler@syr.edu