The film takes an almost modern approach, making the audience at first glance question whether the characters can “cross over” any sense of the definition.
“They looked at Ruth and me and thought, ‘Wow, those are two Black women, as if passing by for what?’ And I think that’s really Rebecca’s intention. She wanted the audience to always know and assume that you’re seeing two Black women, especially Ruth, that you’ll never doubt your convictions,” Thompson mused.
While colorism is a familiar burden on BIPOC communities, outside the Blacks circle, “passes over” in a new concept. Thompson even laughed when he recalled that some people thought “passed away” meant that the actress had passed away when the movie’s poster was first released.
The curtain is drawn back to the “one-drop rule”, a pseudoscientific legal and social construction tool that asserts that any person with even one ancestor of Black ancestry is considered Black , even 1/32 or some other infinitesimal number, and is therefore subject to the laws of segregation. When Homer Plessy boarded that train in 1892, refusing to sit in the exclusively Negro car, the idea of measuring Blackness was born. “Separate but equal” was introduced and was not challenged until Brown sued the Board of Education. TikTok influencers introduced many “white passing” ethnic minorities or the idea of Black Fishing. As Imani Perry states in Harper’s Bazaar, the rules about race membership have changed, and Gen Z is skeptical of the once-in-a-lifetime rule. After the film premiered on Netflix, Black’s Twitter exploded with stories of “passing over,” with Blacks explaining how the idea affected their families and generational consequences. of those options.
“And that’s the thing. The movie was born from there. It comes from Rebecca [Hall] grappling with this legacy in her family [and] try to understand it. And so I’m really curious to hear those stories from people. That’s what I’m really excited about in this world premiere. I think a lot of the stories that I want to tell are, What good is this story? Why do we need this story? Do we need this story? Thompson explained.
Now more than ever, we need these stories, stories like Larsen’s that went into the canon along with Fake life (a 1959 film that tells the story of a popular Broadway star, who audiences learn to be a black-and-white woman who shunned her Black mother to death.) and Brit Bennett’s NS Half disappeared (a novel about twins in which one lives life as a light-skinned black woman and the other turns white, and the consequences it creates for generations after them). As author Koa Beck put it, “Passing can be a window into how we’re not making progress.”
In a way, the film is a Rorschach test for viewers. Do they see two Black women trying to get through or two women dealing with their sexuality or two spouses trying to limit their love?
“I really love and get excited about doing a work that, for some people, is going to be a movie where nothing happens,” Thompson said. “And I think, in that way, the movie is more about people’s reactions to the movie than it is about the movie necessarily, and I find it really interesting. I’m really thrilled to be part of a production that appeals to people on all of those levels. “
