The Best Movie of the Year Was This Hot, Polymorphously Perverse Drama That Engaged Audiences Below the Neckline

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Sometimes, other critics interrupt. Read the first entry here.

Dear Dana, Esther, Bilge, and Mark:

Let me interrupt you all to ask: Why are so many of the best movies of 2023 set in hospitals? Back in January, I fell hard for Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice, a documentary about a hospital chaplain struggling to process her own grief. At Cannes, I was mesmerized and unsettled by De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which casts a dispassionate and unblinking eye on several surgical procedures. (It’s hard to say which scene inspired the most walkouts, but it might have been the one involving a penis and a drill.) And a year-end catch-up finally brought me to Claire Simon’s Our Body, an epic portrait of a hospital’s gynecological ward whose patients eventually include the director herself. Simon is often compared with Frederick Wiseman, whom she calls “my great master,” but with due respect to Wiseman’s terrific Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, the state of woman’s health care feels like a richer and more consequential subject than the inner workings of a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. From that imagined victim of Oppenheimer’s atom blast to the de-sexed dolls of Barbie, it felt as if movies kept asking us to think about the fleshy shells we inhabit. Which is one reason my Top 10 looks like this:

Passages
Past Lives
May December
A Still Small Voice
The Zone of Interest
The Eternal Memory
Oppenheimer
Our Body
Killers of the Flower Moon
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

As you’ve all touched on in your initial posts, this was both a great year for movies and a brutal one for lists—of which, despite the fact that I look like an extra from High Fidelity, I am not an enormous fan. I do, however, believe that if you’re going to indulge in the exercise of arbitrarily limiting yourself to a nice round 10, you’re duty bound to rank them as well. (For me, at least, alphabetization is the coward’s way out.) I was stuck on how to decide which of my favorite movies was favorite-r than the rest, until I thought of a different way to approach the process. Forget “best”—which of these movies have I thought about the most? And once I did that, the answer was obvious: Passages.

Bilge’s list notwithstanding, I haven’t seen Ira Sachs’ movie on too many year-end roundups, but it embodies, so to speak, so much of what I want movies to be: fresh, daring, controlled but un–fussed over, with live-wire performances that feel like they’re coming into being at the instant you’re watching them. Franz Rogowski stars as a polymorphously perverse filmmaker who, to the surprise of his artist husband (Ben Whishaw), starts a passionate affair with a female schoolteacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Rogowski’s Tomas is chaos in a crop top, but his performance is pure lightning, destructive and fascinating. (The New York Film Critics Circle, to which most of us Movie Clubbers belong, did at least award Rogowski Best Actor.) The decline of midbudget movies has pushed stories that engage with the stuff of life to the margins, but Passages is full of that stuff. Its world feels lived-in, its characters recognizable, even if the drama is more heightened and the people hotter than any situation I’ve been (un)fortunate enough to find myself in.

Passages’ explicit love scenes revived a familiar debate about whether sex belongs in cinema: Do we really need to see all that? For one, I’d argue that it’s important for art to include things that aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. As I wrote earlier this year, “We don’t need movies the way we need food or water, but we need them to remind us that being alive is more than drawing breath.” But I’d also say that in the specific case of Passages, those scenes are essential, not just for understanding why the movie’s other characters can’t pry themselves away from Rogowski’s narcissistic fuckboy, but for altering the way your own body is situated in relation to the screen. Like the concert films that took over multiplexes in the last quarter of the year, Passages is a movie you watch with your whole self, not just the part above the neckline. Whether I was dancing or getting turned on or wincing at a scalpel cutting through flesh, it felt good to be a person out in the world, part of the ad hoc organism that is an audience.

I ended up thinking and writing a lot this year about what it means to go to the movies: not just to watch them, but to take part in that ritual, as imperfect and often-debased as it now is. (When the Lumière brothers invented cinema, they didn’t foresee a day when you’d balk at asking the person in front of you to put away their phone for fear of getting punched in the face.) We saw people come back to theaters this year, but their dedication to the experience isn’t the same as it was pre-pandemic. It’s not enough to offer people a six-week head start on the moment a movie ends up on their TVs, or even to hawk the bigness and loudness of a premium-format screening. What Barbenheimer reminded us, more than anything, is that people go to the movies to feel as if they’re part of something, whether it’s a movement or a moment. That might seem to bode ill for movies that don’t wield the muscle of a powerful, blond behemoth (Barbie, Taylor Swift, Christopher Nolan), but I felt as much a part of Passages as anything I saw this year. And now it feels like a part of me.

Read the next entry in the Movie Club: Yes, I Will Defend the Politics of Saltburn!