We Are All Just - - Passing (2021, USA/UK, B/W, 98 min) - -20 January 2022

Strongly recommended. Watching Passing is a transportive experience. It’s a film to return to several times over, inhabiting its carefully constructed mosaic of ambiguity and detail. Of foremost joy is the pairing of two gorgeous and talented actors, Ruth Negga, (Loving) as ebullient Clare, who passes as white, and Tessa Thompson, (Selma) as Irene, stiffly embracing 1929, Harlem-Renaissance blackness but hinting at mysterious ambiguity. Both deserve Oscar nominations. Between them alternates three-phase currents of envy, shame, and desire, occasionally even charging the homoerotic. But almost nothing is explicit in biracial, debut writer/director, Rebecca Hall’s (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) deep read of Nella Larsen’s novel. The initial meeting of Clare and Irene at the segregated Drake Hotel, mixing the rich black-and-white photography (Eduard Grau, A Single Man) and exquisitely purposeful, Prohibition costumery (Marci Rodgers, BlacKkKlansman), is symphonic. BTW, the tinkly-bluesy piano soloist is 99-year-old, Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou. Check her out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKU7iz9RYV0