Technically, the new film Passages (in limited release August 4) is unrated. That was the decision made by its distributor, Mubi, after the MPAA gave the film a scarlet NC-17. That’s a rare (dis)honor in the film world, a mark that a film is so taboo, so risqué that major theater chains would be imprudent to show it. 

Which feels punitive for a movie that merely has the temerity to show a little gay sex. The film is from the co-writer and director Ira Sachs, a darling of the queer indie scene who has of late made gentle and yet decidedly sharp films about family—Love Is Strange, Little Men, Frankie. In Passages, Sachs shifts the domestic picture and explores his European influences, telling the Parisian story of a love triangle with one really bad corner. 

The reason for the NC-17 rating, it’s suspected, is a sex scene between Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his estranged husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw). The two have split up because Tomas, an impulsive and self-involved filmmaker, has recently taken up with a woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos); Tomas and Martin’s bedroom tryst is either an impassioned goodbye or a reconciliatory reunion. It’s an important scene, but I suppose it was too graphic for the notoriously rigid, often queer-averse MPAA. 

Which is a shame for many reasons, but perhaps chiefly because Passages is not a tawdry move in any way. It’s a piercing and often very funny character piece, a study of narcissism masked, at least in part, by bourgeois, Millennial understandings of progressive coupling. But Sachs, who is in his 50s, has not made some condemnatory thinkpiece about what’s wrong with a generation. The people of Passages could, in some senses, be from any time; mercurial partners have existed forever.

Tomas is quite a creation. We first meet him as he is about to wrap his latest film. An actor is not descending a staircase in a way that satisfies Tomas, and he eventually explodes on the poor performer while the crew stands by in awkward quiet. Later, at the wrap party, Tomas is friendlier, more expansive. He wants to dance with Martin, who turns him down. But Agathe, a school teacher with friends in the art world, takes him up on the offer. Was that all it took for them to fall into bed? 

As Tomas and Agathe go from one-night-stand to something more, Rogowski keenly, hilariously illustrates his character’s preening insouciance, the way he glides through the world in the blinkered pursuit of his own pleasures—which he perhaps mistakes for enlightenment. Clad in crop tops and mesh shirts—even at perhaps inopportune times, like when meeting Agathe’s parents—Tomas probably believes that he is showing the squares how to live out loud. But there’s an arrogance in his flouting of propriety, righteously principled as it might be. 

He’s a vain, selfish guy, really. Which could make Passages a grim and frustrating sit—we love an antihero, but maybe not one as petty and fickle as this. But Sachs, ever the humanist, shades his portraiture just enough that we feel a dawning pity for Tomas’s flailing. We also, of course, feel for Martin, a designer at a print shop who is maybe a little bit of a pill but otherwise seems caring and steady—all of the centering, nurturing stuff that Tomas should crave to contain his mess. In Exarchopoulos’s hands, Agathe is no naive doormat; she’s merely someone who, like Martin, trusts Tomas’s ardent attention for an ill-advised period of time. 

Filmed with Euro economy, Passages is a small movie about a big person. But Tomas doesn’t overwhelm Sachs’s calm artistry. If anything, Sachs rises to meet Tomas, closing his film on a breathtaking series of shots when the film is suddenly in rapid motion, matching Tomas’s speed as he barrels through the world. Even then, Sachs maintains the film’s intimacy. He doesn’t pull away to issue any summative judgments. He is simply chasing after Tomas for a while, perhaps just as foolishly infatuated with him as Martin and Agathe are, despite everything. 

Passages is a biting and literate pleasure, the kind of film we don’t see often from American directors. Its sophisticated approach to romance (or, perhaps, the absence of it) is not too cool or alienating, because Sachs and his sterling cast give the film such textured, specific life. At a trim 92 minutes, Passages is not some epic of the heart. But it does linger. It’s a movie to be savored afterwards, over dinner, when you can quiz your date about the film’s depiction of relationships yanked to their breaking points. Just don’t let the candles and the red wine blind you to the potential Tomas lurking across the table.