Passages director Ira Sachs calls NC-17 rating "a form of cultural censorship"

Cinematic streamer MUBI has emerged as an unlikely player in the great war of sex on screen—and they are firmly on the side of unapologetic horniness.

The streamer—which hosts and curates selections of festival-type films—entered the fray this week in response to a decision by the MPA to bestow an NC-17 rating upon director Ira Sachs’ sensual love-triangle Passages. The film, which premiered at Sundance this year, will be hosted unrated by the platform in select theaters with a wider rollout to follow, per Deadline. MUBI called the MPA’s decision “unexpected” and “deeply disappoint[ing].”

“MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating,” they added, per Variety. “MUBI remains committed to releasing Passages nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut.”

The film, which tells the story of a Parisian entanglement between a film director (Franz Rogowski), his husband (Ben Whishaw), and a school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulo), certainly sounds like it doesn’t hold back in the sexiness department, with one scene of the two husbands apparently shot in a single take that runs just over two minutes long. Still, while the actors appear fully nude in many of these scenes, the way they are shot is not “explicit,” “gratuitous,” or “offen[sive],” per an additional statement by MUBI (via Entertainment Weekly).

Historically, directors have cut out swaths of film to downgrade an NC-17 rating to an R, to try to avoid the box office kiss of death that comes from banning younger teens from the theater outright. Midsommar and Infinity Pool are two recent releases that took this path.

For Sachs, however, “there’s no untangling the film from what it is,” per an interview with Los Angeles Times in response to the 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.”

While the NC-17 rating often denotes sexuality considered too extreme for younger viewers—a sticky enough realm to parse as it is—the MPA has also come under fire numerous times for exactly whose sexuality they consider inappropriate: namely, women (Blue Valentine was given an NC-17 rating for one scene where Michelle Williams’ character receives oral sex) and LGBTQ+ people (Blue Is The Warmest Color).

Sachs echoed those sentiments, calling the very existence of the MPA board “so 1950s.” He continued: “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.”

“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,” he concluded. “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.”

Passages will premiere in select New York and Los Angeles theaters August 4.