After the meal and the cake-cutting, the bride’s aunt started to chat as we watched the couple float across the floor for their first dance.
Making life easier for oneself is, of course, the central theme in Passing: both the 1929 book by Nella Larsen, and the new 2021 movie directed by Rebecca Hall.
But I do have an experience of being raised by people who were also raised by people who made choices that were shaped by living in a racist society.” Which, she felt, qualified her to adapt Larsen’s story for the screen.
The aunts tolerated — but did not embrace — Clare, so as soon as she was an adult, she fled their household and began living as a white woman.
Clare became a mother, but was on tenterhooks until her daughter’s birth, hoping her child would be pale enough to pass — which would also keep her own secret safe.
That worry allayed, Clare progresses through life blithely enjoying the privilege her pale skin and her husband’s money provide — until she runs into her childhood bestie, Irene Redfield, in a hotel restaurant.
Clare’s renewed relationship with Irene awakens in her an interest in becoming part of — or at least occasionally visiting — the Black community she abandoned.
And Clare’s reappearance raises internal and external tensions in Irene’s life, too.
But soon she is invited to Harlem events on her own, and Irene begins to resent Clare’s ebullient presence in a social milieu in which she’d previously shone.
Mixed-race people like Clare and Larsen became, on paper, non-existent to the government; they had to declare themselves one race or the other.
In Larsen’s book, Clare is portrayed as a bundle of contradictions: warm and brittle, breezy and desperate, self-revealing and calculating.