Passing

Passing moves slowly, allowing time to admire the period furniture, brownstones, and filmy, dropped-waist dresses. The film’s pace is as deceptive as the characters’ lives. Rebecca Hall’s Passing expands Nella Larson’s story beyond the Nineteen-Twenties into the Twenty-Twenties.

Passing is Rebecca Hall’s beautifully realized directorial debut. Written, produced, and directed by Hall, the film is an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 eponymous novel about two Black women who were best friends during their childhood days in Harlem and who, after having gone their separate ways for decades, are accidentally reunited in the tea room of a downtown NYC hotel.

Shot in black and white that is, so effectively, mostly shades of gray, “Passing” is an extraordinary period drama that delicately imagines the interior lives of two women as they grapple with issues of race, identity and belonging.

There is a tension running through Passing that is mirrored in Tessa Thompson’s performance: the stiffness in her jaw, the tightness between her eyes, the rigidity of her spine. As the audience, we understand. It is the result of lies so brittle a whisper could break them apart. And if we are Black that tension goes beyond empathy, it is recognition. In the Rebecca Hall film, adapted from the lauded novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen, Tessa Thompson nd Ruth Negga are a pair of reunited friends. Both from uptown, both wives, both well-to-do; one white presenting and the other “passing” for white.

Actor Rebecca Hall has chosen to make her directorial debut with a screen adaptation of Passing, a celebrated novella written in 1929 by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen about the phenomenon of passing for white among light-skinned African Americans. Passing doesn’t live on the surface of its subject, but instead bores into the costs of living a lie. And passing is only one kind of lie.