Filmmaker Ira Sachs has spoken out against the Motion Picture Association’s NC-17 rating of his Sundance film “Passages,” slamming the ratings board as “anti-progress” and saying that he will not recut his film to earn an R rating and will instead release the film unrated with distributor MUBI.
“There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” Sachs told The Los Angeles Times. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.”
“Passages,” which premiered at Sundance this year, follows a same-sex couple, Tomas and Martin (Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw), whose relationship is upended when Tomas has an affair with a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchapoulos). The film shows how those relationships change through a series of sex scenes both gay and heterosexual, including one that takes up over two minutes of runtime.
“To make an interesting sex scene is not easy,” Sachs told the Times. “Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film. It has a story. And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience. I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing.”
Beyond the rating handed to his own film, Sachs questioned the existence of the ratings board, calling it “a board that is not visible, that doesn’t make its rules known, that exists in silence.”
“We’re talking about a select group of people who have a certain bent, which seems anti-gay, anti-progress, anti-sex — a lot of things which I’m not,” he continued.
TheWrap has reached out to the MPA for comment, but the organization said in a statement to the Times that its ratings board “rates movies based on their content — what happens on screen and how it is depicted. The sexual orientation of a character or characters is not considered as part of the rating process.”
The NC-17 rating, which was created by the MPA, has largely been avoided by distributors as it is seen as damaging to a film’s appeal to audiences. Another film from this year’s Sundance, the sci-fi horror film “Infinity Pool,” was re-cut by director Brandon Cronenberg to receive an R rating.
Some films choose to go forward with the NC-17 rating, such as John Water’s raunchy 2004 satire “A Dirty Shame” or Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic “Blonde,” which became the first Netflix film to receive the rating.
Others still choose to release their film unrrated, which Sachs did with his 2012 film “Keep the Lights On” and which he plans to do with “Passages” in a mutual decision with MUBI.
“MUBI submitted director Ira Sachs’ PASSAGES to the MPA in anticipation of the theatrical release in the United States. We unexpectedly received an NC-17 rating, which may limit the film’s ability to play in some cinemas nationwide,” the distributor said in a statement sent to TheWrap.
“We are deeply disappointed by the MPA’s decision and MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating. MUBI remains committed to releasing PASSAGES nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut,” the statement continued.
