Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Rebecca Hall
Written by Rebecca Hall
Based on the novel by Nella Larsen (1929)

Cinematography by Edu Grau
Music by Devonté Hynes

Released October 2021

NETFLIX from 10 November 2021

MAIN CAST

Tessa Thompson – Irene (Rene)
Ruth Negga – Clare
André Holland – Brian, Irene’s husband
Bill Camp- Hugh, Clare’s husband
Ashley Ware Jenkins – Zulena

I spent years studying American Literature and more giving talks on it. My interest in Hollywood and novelists meant I focussed mainly on the1920s to 1950s, yet I had never heard of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) until recent years. She does not appear in my 1990s Britannica, nor in The Literary History of The United States, nor in the Cambridge History of American Literature, not even in the “Harlem Renaissance” section. Now Passing is American Literature 101 and has spawned two hundred dissertations and fifty theses. The author was African-American, female and the themes of racial identity, gender, and the issue of self-identification tick every box in 2021. I like novels being discovered and lauded years after publication … Wuthering Heights was an example. So was John Kennedy O’Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. It gives hope for novelists that posterity will reward their efforts with interest and praise, even if they will have been gone before the financial rewards kick in. Enough about me and my hopes. I ordered a copy, and will amend as I read

I looked online to find an image of the first edition (below). There are at least a couple of dozen different editions of the book.

Now there’s the film, 2021. It is tipped for the Awards season, and it ticks a few boxes for that too. It’s filmed in black and white (to reflect the theme) and in 4:3 format, to reflect the year it’s set in … 1929. I went to IMDB to see if it had been filmed using analogue cameras and film stock, but no, it’s all digital. Kenneth Branagh is going the same B&W route this year for Belfast.

The theme is “Passing”, a black person being seen as white. Irene says in the film, and centrally in the trailer:

Irene: It’s easy for a Negro to pass as white. I’m not sure it ‘d be so simple for a white person to pass as coloured.

Indeed. See the recent debate on the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface, which apparently traumatised 2021 students exposed to it.

This quote comes in multiple reviews and IMDB:

In casting the two main characters, Rebecca Hall said she had to find two actors that could play either role, because both of them are so seduced by and interested in each other’s lives. Ruth Negga agreed, suggesting that if they were doing it as a stage play, the actors could trade roles every other night. Tessa Thompson, however, demurred: “I would never want to play Clare. I love Ruth in this part so much, I wouldn’t have done it.”

There are strong biographical ties. Nella Larsen was born in Chicago, her father was mixed race Danish-Caribbean, her mother was Danish-American and white. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried, to a fellow Danish-American whose name Nella was given. She lived in a white neighbourhood as a child, but met racial discrimination. So she was in a no man’s land where she lacked acceptance from white society, but had no access to the African-American world of (as she saw it) jazz music and churches. Then she attended the black Fisk University, but was expelled for violating the strict dress code. She next spent formative years in Denmark where though her mixed race was seen, it did not involve any discrimination. Then she married a famous African-American physicist who had a Ph.D, Dr Elmer Imes, noted for early work on quantum physics. They lived in Harlem and knew the leading lights in the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). According to Wikipedia, she also had issues in fitting in with the highly-educated African-American elite, because her background was more humble and she lacked a college degree.

This is all reflected in the story. I recall Meghan Markle once saying that she had problems with getting acting roles because she looked too white to be cast for black roles, and too black for white roles. Actually, I’ve seen her in person and she would easily pass as white to my eyes. She would have been perfect casting in this, but I believe she’s busier elsewhere. It also reminds me of a conversation with an Afro-Caribbean actor in one of our videos. She was saying that if you were a BAME actor working in film or theatre and importantly you were also physically attractive, you could easily and temporarily forget about race and discrimination. Then you’d go out with a friend or relative of your ethnicity in the ordinary world and it would suddenly leap right out at you again and so would be a far greater shock. The director, Rebecca Hall, is also an actor and has been mainly cast in white roles, though she is partly African-American.

Plot, or rather comments on the plot

We see the story through Irene. We open with her walking into the fancy tea rooms at a Chicago hotel, The Drayton. She has a wide brimmed hat and keeps her head down, and is herself “passing” in that the hotel would have discriminated and refused her entry. She sees Clare, her best friend when she was a child, in the hotel. Clare has blonde hair and is “passing” to the full extent of being married to a racist white bigot who believes she’s white. Irene is married to Brian, a medical doctor in Harlem.

For me, I’m not sure the blonde hair for Clare was a good idea, in that it’s over the top in presenting as white. My instant thought was Etta James or other African-American singers who found it ironic (or startling) to have dyed blonde hair. As her husband appeared and starting spitting bile with the N-word, it made us think she would have to pay very careful attention to her hair roots, let alone other areas. Though of course, many dark-haired white people do dye their hair blonde. I thought having blonde hair focussed attention on her other facial features which may not have been as noticeable in a woman with darker hair. In the original book, Irene describes herself when she sees a woman staring at her:

Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that there before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayon (Hotel) sat a Negro?

Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell, and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gypsy. Never when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.

I would have had Clare look like a Mediterranean woman rather than a soul singer in a wig – and the book cover illustrations seem to concur. However, the blonde hair is in the novel:

Just as she’d always had that pale gold hair …

Clare’s guise is something she tries to cover in front of her husband, joking that anyone may be one or two per cent black. She only has one child and confides her fear that a further child may be dark. Again, it brought up a story I told in a recent article. When I was a kid, the local mantra was that if you had one black ancestor 500 years ago, the random chance might mean you could have a black baby. That was the story we heard, and thought little of it. So, indeed several kids two or three years older than me were mixed race … with white parents. I found out why years later in an airport limo in Washington DC heading to the airport. The driver was African-American and asked where I came from. I said ‘Bournemouth.’ He said, ‘Do you know Winton.’ I said I had grown up there. He told me he was there with the US Army in 1944, and they separated white and black soldiers in separate districts, and added, ‘Very, very friendly women in Winton.’ I said that might explain the number of mixed-race kids two or three years older than me, and he had to pull the car over, because he was laughing so much, which started me laughing too. We both ended up in tears of laughter.

Of course, that English tale is the other way around to the American narrative, where mixed race goes back to slavery days, and almost always originated with a white male exploiting a black female. Raping slaves was legal. It also involved the complex language of racism … mulatto (half black), quadroon (quarter black), octaroon (one eighth black), hexadecaroon (one sixteenth black). The French West Indies got even further with words for 5/8, 7/8, 1/32 and 1/64. The lines were that fine. Walter Francis White, an early Civil Rights leader was blonde and blue-eyed, as well as having a pale surname. Twenty-seven of his thirty two great great great grandparents were white, but he identified as black. You can see why the theme of ‘identification’ is timely beyond the race issue.

Clare’s story echoes Nella Larsen’s. Clare was orphaned and brought up by two white aunts.

After the meeting in Chicago, Irene goes back to Harlem, New York. She lives in a fine house with her doctor husband and two sons, and has a black servant girl, Zulena. She ignores letters from Clare.

Then Clare turns up. She is now trying to re-identify with the African-American community. She befriends Irene’s sons. She befriends Zulena, the servant in particular. Clare wants to go to parties … one is to welcome a distinguished white author … their social circle is definitely middle-class, reasonably wealthy and educated. Irene worries that her husband fancies Clare. There is an undercurrent where you feel Clare and Irene are also attracted to each other.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s enigmatic. An event happens. We don’t know whether it is accidental, or if deliberate who was responsible.

Language

It’s a minefield because it changes so fast. I had long arguments with American editors over US text books. The books were international, but they insisted the only allowed descriptive term was African-American, never “black”. I pointed out songs like Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud or Young Gifted & Black. Moreover, I pointed out that British black people were NOT African-American, though we also have the term Afro-Caribbean. Then Africans, Jamaicans, black Brazilians, black Cubans, Melanesians, Australian aborigines and others were not African-American either. I remember sitting there saying ‘People from Nigeria are NOT African-American.’ The editor explained as if to a child, ‘But that’s what we call them.’

A film in 2021 has a precipice to walk on terms. Just three days before I saw the film, President Biden was castigated in the press for calling baseball legend Satchel Paige a great negro at the time. The word negro is used in the film, and by Irene. As far as I can tell it was an acceptable term until the late 1950s. People are shouted down for saying ‘coloured person’ rather than ‘person of colour.’ The Wiki entry gets in knots being careful to say free people of color, but then has to spell out that NAACP means National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Negro and coloured are the general words in the novel.

I think the N-word itself only appears in a couple of places in the film, the first time causing traumatic horror for Irene. However offensive it was in 1929, I doubt that she would have been quite so shocked to hear it … the strength of her reaction is surely a 2021 view. In the original novel, it appears peppered through Clare’s husband’s speech, plus his pet name for Clare is ‘Nig’ because he jokes she is getting darker, which goes into the film. In the book the focus is on the husband’s vituperative hatred of black people, and though he uses the N-word, I feel the offence was the sentiment rather than the vocabulary.

Overall

The film has much going for it … the lead performances, the powerful stylistic concept of both black and white pictures and 4:3 (1.33:1) format. It proves yet again how fine black and white film looks on a modern screen. I’m doubtful about its Awards chances, because it’s interesting rather than absorbing or enthralling, and it is low key, which is a virtue in a world filled with widescreen all-action superhero adventures.

Whatever, it’s on Netflix. It’s free and new and well-worth watching.