Controversial Choices

Tessa Thompson & Ruth Negga in Passing

Cover and Above Images: Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in the Passing

BY: Nadia Carmon

Two childhood friends reunite and discover they’ve been living entirely different lives as women of color – One as a loving wife and mother immersed in the African American community, the other a white-passing woman who is married to a white man, in 2021’s Passing.

Directed by Rebecca Hall (‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’, ‘The Awakening’) in her directorial debut, and based on the 1929 novella by Nella Larsen, Passing stars Tessa Thompson (‘Thor: Ragnarok’, ‘Creed’) and Ruth Negga (‘Loving’, ‘Breakfast On Pluto’), as reunited childhood friends Irene and Claire.

Ruth Negga holding a floral wallet and Tessa Thompson holding a bouquet of flowers in the Passsing — Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in a scene from Passing

Now settled into their own separate adult lives, the worldviews of the two women get a volatile shakeup when they’re confronted with the vastly different realities of the life the other leads.
The film examines the two women’s complicated friendship, which is complicated even more by their divergent experiences of privilege and prejudice, racism and colorism, and their relationships with their husbands John (Alexander Skarsgård) and Dr. Brian Redfield (André Holland).

Like the yin and yang, Irene and Claire navigate their own lives, soul searching through those things which once gave them a sense of purpose and meaning, but instead find renewed insecurities as they see the life they’ve always wanted – The freedom, desire, love and belonging – reflected in the other.

Tessa Thompson Face Closeup in the Passing — Tessa Thompson in the Passing

Director Rebecca Hall was inspired to make this film after spending time reflecting on her own family’s roots. Like Nella Larsen herself, whose father was an Afro-Caribbean man of mixed ancestry and whose mother was of Danish origin, the director’s maternal ancestry includes a great-grandfather and grandfather of dual African and Dutch heritage.

Her great grandfather had been enslaved in Virginia, and his son – her grandfather, had learned to pass as white in order to survive.

Subsequently, the very story of her family’s African ancestry became taboo. A dirty secret that was never talked about.

Hall admits that although she never had a “language for passing” growing up, she has nonetheless had the experience of “being raised by people who have been raised by people who have made choices that are configured by living in a racist framework.”

Passing arrives on Netflix on November 10th.