She also has a handsome husband who’s a doctor, a pair of well-behaved children, an elegant townhouse and a maid to help keep the domestic churn in check.
Set in the 1920s, “Passing” tells what happens to Irene , who’s oblivious to her history.
The two meet again by accident, each having taken refuge from the blistering summer heat in the grand tearoom of a fashionable New York Hotel.
Irene may be on her guard in the hotel, but the very fact that she enters the tearoom speaks to her self-confidence and to how she has learned to navigate the color line.
But there’s a stubborn rigidity to Irene’s self-assurance and how she engages her reality, and she is by turns surprised, baffled and angered that other people’s actions and desires don’t always conform to her own.
In sticking close to the novel, Hall has pulled scenes and lines from the book, but she also visually conveys how Irene sees and exists in her world, mapping the coordinates of a life and consciousness through the expressionistic lighting, through the many tonalities of the black-and-white visuals and through the elegant rooms that edge on dollhouse claustrophobia.
When Clare disappears for a while, Irene comes into greater focus as does her brittle exasperation with her husband, Brian Negro Welfare League and by her insistence that Brian avoid talking about race in front of their sons.
But in little and big moments — in coyly and sharply delivered lines, in hesitant and abrupt movements — Hall and Thompson play with and subvert your sympathies, pushing you far enough away so that you can actually see, and become equally invested in, Clare too.
Again and again, you watch these two characters discreetly or openly watching each other — Irene’s eyes are darting and demure, Clare’s searching and intense — creating a network of looks.
But what does Irene desire? Clare’s beguiling beauty or her seductiveness, her wealth or her outward, presumably futile escape from the burdens of race? With restraint and bursts of plaintive emotion, Negga shows you how casually Clare receives attention — this is a woman accustomed to admiration — but she also shows you the performative quality of this blitheness, the moments when Clare drops whatever mask she’s wearing.
At one point early in the novel, Larsen writes of Irene: “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” There is so much embedded in those last three words — not entirely friendly! The mind reels, and the heart breaks, though, like Larsen, Hall maintains her cool.