The Moody Bisexual Artist in Passages and Petra Von Kant

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“Marlene, be more considerate.” So says famed fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) from bed after her assistant (Irm Hermann) pulls the blinds. It’s late in the morning, after ten, but Petra won’t let anyone know that she’s just woken up. She holds court in her bed; in quick succession, she has Marlene fetch her fresh orange juice, takes a call from her mother where she says she’s been up for ages, orders Marlene to work on a sketch, then dictates a note to her landlord: “My dear friend, I will be unable to make payment…There are circumstances between heaven and earth… But who am I talking to?”

Who is Petra talking to? In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s glimmering drama, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), our titular designer speaks mostly to herself and her silent assistant within a hybrid bedroom-atelier. The viewer never sees Petra working on her craft – rather, we see her take care to maintain what’s left of her reputation. When she receives a call to design for a well-known fashion house, Petra insists she must check her calendar, pauses, takes three beats while holding the phone, her day not yet started, and says she can squeeze them in on Friday. Never mind that the fashion house didn’t want to work with her three years ago. She must maintain her own mythos outside these walls even if inside she is crumbling.

In Passages, Ira Sachs’ simmering 2023 drama, we meet mercurial filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) much in the same way we meet Petra – making orders. Tomas is directing his latest film, which we see from the slate is also called Passages, and much like Petra, he is relentless. Tomas has the lead actor walk down a flight of steps four times in rehearsal to make the transition more natural. He stops a take when he notices an extra holding her glass wrong, then barks at a PA to fill her glass. Multiple times he stops filming to tell someone to “relax” and “act like you like the place.” 

Later, when his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) leaves the wrap party early, Tomas starts dancing with young teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). “My own party, and my husband won’t dance with me,” he says before going back to her apartment. A perceived slight at the party, and he begins an affair. In how Petra seems to be talking past her own lack of consideration, Tomas talks past his own restlessness and inability to be happy where he is.  

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“Petra and Tomas are in liminal spaces artistically, the former in a creative slump and the latter just finishing a film. They fall for younger women who invigorate them with their beauty and seeming innocence. Most notably, Petra and Tomas are allowed to be bisexual and behave badly at the same time; sexuality and behavior are never correlated but instead coexist.”

When speaking with Interview magazine, Sachs said the only thing he took from Fassbinder was “beauty” and some costume inspiration from the late director’s mise-en-abyme film Beware of a Holy Whore. Both Sachs’ Passages and Fassbinder’s Petra Von Kant, however, focus on power dynamics, love triangles, and the mercurial bisexual artists at their center. Petra and Tomas are in liminal spaces artistically, the former in a creative slump and the latter just finishing a film. They fall for younger women who invigorate them with their beauty and seeming innocence. Most notably, Petra and Tomas are allowed to be bisexual and behave badly at the same time; sexuality and behavior are never correlated but instead coexist, nor is bisexuality ever questioned in their respective worlds. When Tomas tells Martin that he had sex with a woman, Martin is upset with his husband’s infidelity, not the person’s gender. “This always happens when you finish a film,” he says. “You just forget.”

Words: Jayne O’Dwyer

Petra, too, forgets. Her ex-husband’s coercive ways, the physical and emotional abuse, are what led her to end the relationship, yet shades of abuse show through in her domineering relationship with Marlene. This pattern only extends to her new connection with Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young married woman looking to model. Petra quickly makes Karin’s world very small, insisting that she move in while Petra pays for her career. With Marlene watching them both, Petra and Karin’s once promising mentor-mentee dynamic is complicated by Petra’s unrequited love and the shifting power dynamic between them. Fassbinder’s choice to confine this queer love triangle to Petra’s bedroom is a technical and narrative feat. The single space only exacerbates the suffocating nature of Petra’s insecurity, and as she oscillates from doting to nagging, from “love me” to “lie to me,” we feel every emotional shift between the three women. This is the magic of Petra Von Kant – what the film lacks in physical landscape it makes up for in emotional terrain.

Sachs smartly chooses to deviate from Fassbinder’s portrait of a bisexual artist by not confining his impulsive narrator to one physical space. While Petra remains in her home, Tomas is riding the high of finishing a film. He is artistically and morally vulnerable. After the affair begins, Martin quickly kicks Tomas out, yet Tomas immediately moves in with Agathe. When she is upset with him, he runs back to Martin to beg for forgiveness. Riding back and forth on his bike, Tomas flits from home to home, going wherever he may be welcome at the time, his erratic movement mimetic of his emotional state. As if struggling with object permanence, he professes his love for Martin and how he loves being with a man just after declaring his love for Agathe. Yet both husband and girlfriend intimate this. Agathe says as much when Tomas tells her he loves her for the first time: “You say it when it’s convenient for you.” It is in Tomas’ flitting that the white-hot chemistry of Passages crackles. We believe him when he says he loves Martin just as much as when he confesses his feelings for Agathe, and we see the same love and frustration from them. Sachs approaches Tomas much how Fassbinder approaches Petra: with curiosity.

Passages received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, a move which Sachs deemed “censorship” given the film’s LGBTQ sex scenes. MUBI, the film’s distributor, released the film without a rating and gave Sachs its full support. At a time when anti-gay legislation is rising and visible queerness is deemed a threat, characters like Petra and Tomas must be on screen, seen in all their complication, without judgment.