Quote of the Day

"There’s no untangling the film from what it is... 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... To make an interesting sex scene is not easy. Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film. It has a story. And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience. I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing…What I tried to track here was to not look at sex, but to look at intimacy, not constructed through editing and avoidance... We hunger for movies that are in any proximity to our own experience, and to find a movie like this, which is then shut out, is, to me, depressing and reactionary. It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist.”

That is Passages director Ira Sachs talking to the Los Angeles Times on the NC-17 rating the MPA just tried to drop on his movie, which stars Ben Whishaw and Franz Rogowski as a married couple whose relationship spirals into chaos because Franz runs off to boink Adèle Exarchapoulos a bunch. I saw and reviewed the film out of Sundance, right here -- there is indeed a lot of sex in the movie, and it is all very hot, and I am very happy that Sachs and MUBI are sticking to their guns and releasing the movie unrated. Go subscribe to MUBI, y'all -- cancel Netflix and subscribe to a streamer that gives a shit about its artists! And go see Passages when it hits theaters on August 4th. You can watch the trailer right here.