In Passages, Adèle Exarchopoulos Brings the Heat

Note: The actor profiled in this story is not a member of SAG-AFTRA, which is currently on strike, and Mubi—the distributor of the film discussed—is not a struck company.

With his new film Passages, director Ira Sachs offers an exquisitely seductive meditation on desire. The acclaimed indie filmmaker’s latest stars Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw as a stylish married couple whose relationship is turned upside down when a captivating young school teacher, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, enters their lives. As the three navigate their dysfunctional dynamic, Sachs examines how even a transient affair can leave a permanent mark—and how a devastating, darkly humorous, and unconventionally erotic film can be one of the sexiest in recent memory.

“I love that it’s not the subject of the film, that they’re homosexual and one loves a girl. It’s just, like, this is a couple [who has been together a long time] and they face the fact that one of them is going to cross a boundary and take the risk of losing the other one,” Exarchopoulos, who is best known for starring in 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, tells Vogue.

“It’s a movie about the present; it’s modern,” she adds. “And it’s also about transition—what can touch you in life, even if you know it’ll be just an experience of a few months, but it can change you forever.”

At the beginning of the film—cowritten by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias and set in Paris and the French countryside—the threesome meets at a wrap party for Tomas’s (Rogowski) latest directorial effort, a moody, European period piece. In a moment they’ll all come to regret, Martin (Whishaw), a printmaker and artist in his own right, bows out of dancing for the evening and leaves his mercurial husband and Agathe (Exarchopoulos) alone, writhing in clingy going-out clothes under the club’s colored lights. 

Igniting something unexpected in Tomas, Agathe ends up in bed with him that night—and so begins a chain of events powered by the domineering Tomas’s voracious appetite for sex and intimacy. He soon leaves his comfortable marriage with Martin to move in with Agathe, but when Martin, in turn, pursues a relationship of his own with a successful writer named Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), it draws Tomas’s attention, despite his promises to Agathe.

It’s a story at least loosely inspired by Sachs’s own life and relationship history: He’s been married to the painter Boris Torres since 2012 and co-parents with filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. Yet, while an interest in complex relationships is nothing new for Sachs—who has explored tumultuous romances in much of his most celebrated work, including the films Keep the Lights On and Love Is Strange—Passages is unique, its characters’ effortless cool and fluidity around sexuality and relationships feeling especially of the moment.

With her youthful and down-to-earth European femininity—inspired by screen sirens like Laura Antonelli, Jeanne Moreau, and Brigitte Bardot—Agathe in particular brings something different to Sachs’s oeuvre. “We spoke a lot about all the codes that society gives us, that our education or religion gives us, and how it’s hard to [reconcile] with desire—because we all have some,” Exarchopoulos says of developing her character with Sachs. “We talked about questions of intimacy, nudity, sexuality, silence, and his inspirations—conversations without conclusions, sometimes, but that can feed a character.”

Although Agathe’s charms incite both men’s interest in different ways, Exarchapoulos was especially keen to explore the unexpected but powerful connection that her character forges with Tomas—the match that sets fire to everyone’s lives. “Since day one, after dancing with him, she knows she will have something with him,” she says. “It’s rare, but we all experience the fact that you meet someone and after, like, 15 minutes you know that one day—maybe in 10 years, maybe in 10 minutes—you will have sex with this person. You just feel it.” Exarchopoulos adds that she’s attracted to characters who experience such moments of kismet.

Since her breakout performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial Blue Is the Warmest Colour—in which she appeared as a French teen who finds love with an older art student—Exarchopoulos has continued to draw praise for her roles in relatively under-the-radar French films. But Passages, which has commanded major attention from critics and audiences since its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, marks the French actor’s return to the heights of the international film scene in earnest.

Exarchopoulos more than holds her own with Rogowski, a German dancer turned actor who has emerged in recent years as a go-to leading man, and Whishaw, a British actor who has worked steadily on both indie and big-budget productions since the early aughts. Her presence is particularly felt in the incredibly sensual but discreet sex scenes between Agathe and Tomas, as well as in Agathe’s quiet, empathetic relationship with Martin, the two bound together by their desire (and eventual disgust) for the same man.

“It was really interesting to play with [Ben] because he has this sense of rhythm and silence. And you have this kind of mystery that comes naturally from him,” Exarchopoulos says. “With Franz, he has something really animal, straight, masculine—because he completely assumes his femininity. There is something really alive when you play with him.”

Exarchopoulos and Rogowski shared a particularly intimate working relationship on set, tasked as they were with bringing their characters’ intense sexual dynamic to life but without crossing the boundary that Exarchopoulos had established when she joined the project.

“I told [Franz], ‘I don’t want to be nude. But I agreed to play intimacy—sex. So how can we reinvent it?’ And he was really conscious about how I felt,” she says. The result was subtly choreographed moments of fervent lovemaking—against walls and various other surfaces—that rely on both the actors’ physicality and the way the camera captures their seduction. Before Agathe and Tomas’s first sexual encounter, for instance, the pair find their rhythm on the dance floor and then circle each other quietly, almost predatorily, in Agathe’s apartment—finally consummating the affair behind closed doors.

“There was this kind of European way of shooting. It was a really free, open space. We didn’t have a lot of marks on the ground or marks of time. It was an experimental way of making cinema,” Exarchopoulos says.

The chemistry between the actors—including between Rogowski and Whishaw, who share a two-minute sex scene that likely earned the film its confounding NC-17 rating—seems all the more impressive given they didn’t spend much time together before filming. Sachs is known for eschewing rehearsals in order to encourage creativity and spontaneity as the cameras roll, and in his eighth feature’s talented ensemble, he seems to have found a particularly like-minded group. “Even if you [have] three coffees and go to two restaurants, you never know what is inside people,” Exarchopoulos says of meeting her costars on set. “Sometimes when you catch them at the moment where you have to share something deep and intimate, it’s even more fearless and powerful to act in this way.”

The first scene that the three stars shot together was the one at the party that opens the film, which for Exarchopoulos called to mind making Blue Is the Warmest Colour: “The first week of shooting was the sex scenes,” she remembers. “And I think it really helped the rest of the shoot because Léa [Seydoux] and I were facing being really naked in front of each other and, of course, it broke down our boundaries.”

Likewise, she says, Passages “is a movie about the flesh, about desire. So to go straight to the point where we met—the dance scene—helped us to not be frustrated by our fears and to just jump into the adventure.” And yet, as the film’s three lovers discover, connecting with someone on the dance floor or in the nude only affords so much insight. “It still doesn’t mean that you know everything about the person,” Exarchopoulos says.

Passages is in theaters August 4.