Passing

This is a strange film, that gives mixed experiences, from aesthetic exaltation to a deficient dramaturgy; which is already strange, because as an adaptation of a novel (1929), it should have resolved its dramaturgy. This is not precisely because of the stylistic excess, which the English language does not allow in its North American syntax; but that cinema does stimulate, because of the aesthetic possibilities with which photography affects drama.

Passing tells of two black girlfriends, who meet again in a  New York subject to segregation laws;  and  one of which passes for white, in one of the most recurrent existential dramas of American culture. That can be a bit contrived for other cultures outside the North American, laxer in their racism: for in truth, American racism is virulent and reinforced by political rigorism,  in a strange and explosive mixture;  which links rational simplification to the ferocity of an impoverished class, such as the early Irish migration, in competition with emancipated blacks.

Hence the meticulous code of the drop of black blood, which discourages and punishes any effort at integration; giving rise to dramas like this one by Passing, as early  in the cinema as in 1934, with Imitation of Life. This dilemma may still not be understandable, because the pernicious reduction of the Negro to its most impoverished class; without the strip of political and  economic ambiguity, in which people  relate to each other beyond their race.

The film does not resolve  this context, unbalancing its dramaturgy, wallowing in its own moral supremacism; although it does manage to break the stereotype of the indigent black, with a relatively prosperous and snobbish bourgeoisie.  The original novel develops  the existential  impact of contradiction, when people lie about themselves; but the film fails to  resolve that, with the simple overlap of elements not directly related to each other, without the required developments.

An example of this is the reluctance of the protagonist to face the dilemma in its political dimension, as a family; being a social activist, involved in an organization reminiscent of the NAACP. Perhaps the object is a critique of the snobbery and limitations of that black liberal bourgeoisie, for its lack of commitment; that not only did it not pour its resources —not that it had many— into its own community, concentrated on its own elitism.

Nor does the casting of the protagonists help, with two actresses who hardly ever pass for white; which is irrelevant in theater or television, but not in the greater realism of cinema, because the conventions to which it responds. That and the hysterical volatility of the current political context, threatens a serene perception of the history the film narrates; which otherwise would have been able  to channel a powerful drama, just limiting itself to being cinema.

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The film does excel in dazzling photography, bringing out the best of black and white, and its epochal recreation; although that results in the greater slowness of a poorly resolved dramaturgy, which gives the feeling of emptiness. That may be the problem of the excessive aestheticization of drama, which original violence does not require poetics nor transcendentalism; as a false styling of black cinema,  which resolves in its own existential inconsistency, trying to pass for intellectual (white). It is the same excess that unnecessarily thickens interesting experiments, such as  that of Daughters of Dust (1991); and with what it question that same consistency they claim, disdaining their own dramatic elements; which are not intellectual but existential, reproducing the contradiction that affects American intellectualism, in its artificiality.

In short, it is not only in the upper middle class  —and those which seek to integrate it— that  idealistic reverie flourishes; it is the one that has resources to waste on it, or to distort its perception of reality with false priorities, nor less false humanism. The overlooked reference to the NAACP in this film may remind us of this, precisely because of the political ambiguity of its origin; like that false bourgeoisie of Harlem, which fails again and again to understand its own contradictions.