Out director Ira Sachs slams his new queer film’s NC-17 rating, calling the MPA “anti-gay”

Ira Sachs’s new film Passages has received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and the out director is not happy about it.

The film, which had its world premiere in January at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it received rave reviews. Set in Paris, Passages tells the story of a love triangle involving a queer couple (played by Ben Whishaw and Franz Rogowski) and a woman (Adèle Exarchapoulos). As the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the NC-17 rating, notes, the film’s exploration of the trio’s complicated dynamics involves several sex scenes.

Related:

‘Downton Abbey’ filmmakers had to appeal to get ‘PG’ rating with gay content

The film raised the question about whether homophobic content should prevent all audiences from seeing a movie.

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Viewers under the age of 17 are banned from screenings of films with an NC-17 rating, even with a parent or guardian. According to the L.A. Times, a sex scene involving Whishaw and Rogowski’s characters in which Whishaw’s bare buttocks are visible was central to the MPA’s decision.

Sachs blasted the MPA for rating Passages NC-17. “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 told the L.A. Times. He added that the MPA’s written notification of the film’s rating read “like it was written by my great-aunt.”

As the L.A. Times notes, Sachs’s 2012 film Keep the Lights On was released without a rating, and he views the R rating his 2014 film Love Is Strange received as unfair. Both films depicted gay relationships.

He explained that there is no question of recutting Passages to get an R rating. “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,” he said.

The film’s distributor, MUBI, will instead release Passages uncut without a rating. 

“Passages is an honest and groundbreaking portrait of contemporary relationships, both queer and straight,” MUBI said in a statement. “Frank and thoughtful portrayals of sex are essential to cinematic storytelling and in service of representation more broadly. An NC-17 rating suggests the film’s depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is also false.”

“We hunger for movies that are in any proximity to our own experience, and to find a movie like this, which is then shut out, is, to me, depressing and reactionary,” Sachs said. “It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist.”

Sach’s comments evoke the nationwide efforts by conservatives to ban LGBTQ+ books from schools and public libraries and to censor discussions of LGBTQ+ topics in classrooms.

A spokesperson for the MPA said that films featuring LGBTQ+ themes and same-sex sex scene are not rated differently from other films. “The MPA’s Classification and Rating Administration 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 MPA said in a statement.