‘Passages’ Director Calls Out MPA for Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias for NC-17 Rating

There are movies that sneak up on you, and you don’t realize they’ve come out, but when you do, it turns out they’re great. Recently, one of those movies has been Passages. The film about Tomas (Franz Rogowski) being a villain in his relationships to Martin (Ben Whishaw) and Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and earned itself an NC-17 rating due to its sex scenes, but according to director Ira Sachs, he considers the rating censorship.

While talking to The L.A. Times, Sachs talked about how he wasn’t going to cut the sex to appease the Motion Picture Association for an R rating. “There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” said Sachs. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.” The MPA and ratings are fascinating to unpack, mainly because they don’t have the best track record, and the entire film rating system’s history is steeped in censorship.

Mubi, the streaming service that released the film, pushed back against the rating, saying, “‘Passages’ is an honest and groundbreaking portrait of contemporary relationships, both queer and straight. Frank and thoughtful portrayals of sex are essential to cinematic storytelling and in service of representation more broadly. An NC-17 rating suggests the film’s depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is also false.”

And that’s honestly the truth of the situation. It’s not gratuitous; it’s just simple sex scenes, and the fact that there is this much outrage when one of the sex scenes is between Tomas and Martin does feel like the MPA is censoring one particular kind of sex, more than they have others.

Television has more graphic sex scenes, but there are no labels on that

It’s truly wild for the MPA to be up in arms about a movie like Passages, which is about the relationships of one man and how he explores sex with both his partners. While movies have accepted NC-17 ratings since 1990, like Shame and most recently the Netflix film Blonde, that doesn’t mean that something like Passages should accept it. It’s not a film that is any different than what we see on things like HBO, and that’s not labeled NC-17.

We have sex so easily accessible on television, especially when you look at how sex played a role in Game of Thrones (TV-MA, basically TV’s R rating), and yet a movie about the relationships that Tomas is going through is too much? The scenes are not overpowering and they don’t take up the whole film, so in reality, the rest of the movie is being limited because of two scenes in particular. It’s ridiculous, and Sachs is justified in being upset over the rating. It makes it seem like they just gave it a harsher rating because one of said sex scenes was a consensual sex scene between two men.

Movies like Basic Instinct have R ratings. Even Eyes Wide Shut got an R rating back in the ’90s. To label Passages, which is barely about the sex scenes, NC-17 does feel targeted. This isn’t the first time that Sachs has had an issue with ratings, either. His film Keep the Lights On was unrated, and his followup Love Is Strange was rated R for language. Both films were about gay couples, much like Tomas and Martin’s relationship in Passages.

(featured image: Mubi)