MQFF NOTES: The Pass (2016, Dir. Ben A. Williams)

Close quarters hasn’t been kind to Ben A. Williams’ screen transfer of John Donnelly’s play The Pass. Taking what is essentially three interconnected single-scene two-handers and turning them into an experience that is both coherent and cinematic was always going to be a challenge. Doing the same with the play’s original writer on screenplay duties makes that process doubly difficult. The stage is more forgiving of extremes.

Williams has filled the screen here. Firstly with his underwear wearing protagonists, two young footballers, Jason (Russell Tovey) and Ade (Arinzé Kene), who are knocking about before a career making/breaking match. Their bodies are screen-filling. Their energy is screen-filling. Their character is screen-filling. But so is Donnelly’s sub-text… which here should probably be labelled super-text. Jason and Ade bounce off each other with theatrical capriciousness, rebounding off the walls with hairpin mood swings, until they arrive at the thematic crux: a tender kiss.

But footballers don’t do that. Not if they want to be successful. Flash forward five years and Jason, now famous, has invited a woman back to his hotel room to re-assert his heterosexuality. Flash forward another five years to find Ade invited into Ade’s hotel room for a final reunion-come-confrontation.

Tovey and Kene put in performances better than the material they’re working with here. Donnelly’s script elides years but allows his characters little emotional growth. This may well hit the nail on Jason’s head but it feels too convenient when blanketed over Ade’s as well, especially when other characters enter their boiler-room.

The Pass does the job; everyone says what they need to say about masculinity and homophobia in sport, about the lengths players will go to cover their sexualities up, and about the damage this causes to them and those around them, but not with any nuance and not with any feeling.

★★★

Trailer:

The Pass screened as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2017. 

You can check out other films from the festival here.