PASSING – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

Everything about Passing, the astonishing and just-plain-satisfying debut of actor Rebecca Hall as a writer and director, feels like a revelation. This is a movie that is simultaneously incredibly modern, like it could only have been made today, but also could be a little treasure rediscovered from pre-Code Hollywood. Not just because it’s based on a novel, by Nella Larsen, from 1929. And not just because of Hall’s choices to shoot in black-and-white and in an old-fashioned square aspect ratio. But because it feels like Passing could have been one of the movies that inspired that absolute bastard Will H. Hays to implement his censorious code.

A movie about the interior lives of Black women? (Are Black women human? Signs point to yes!) About happy — and materially successful — Black family life that is able to find joy even in a society that wants to crush it? About the perniciousness of racism that leads some Black people, when they are able to, to pretend they are White? That suggests that while racism is of course incredibly real and dangerous, race itself is complete invention that would not endure if it were not serving some insidious purpose? Continue reading…