Passages is a 92-minute 2023 movie by American filmmaker Ira Sachs. A long, fiery meditation on relationships, their breaking, making and breaking again in Paris. The movie doesn’t tiptoe around intimate relationships and how love distorts when things go awry. It is a bracing, if lacerating, portrayal of a chaotic but highly creative, moody independent film-maker Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) as he moves between his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and his new lover Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). And Tomas’ vintage, racing bike.

Smitten and simmering as he is, Tomas rips through the city of Paris on this bike, using it to express passive aggression, jubilation and other such accentuated emotions that come naturally to us humans. The bike serves as an extension of Tomas’ athletic physicality, expressing on his behalf as he bounces through the winding alleys or the main, traffic clogged squares of the metropolis. On dark winter nights, after a night cap, he rides the bike, wearing it as an attitude to flaunt. Something so poetic, chic and singular about this use of the bike stood out for me in this movie.

I should come clear: As someone how doesn’t know how to bike, I definitely hold a rather poetic notion about the two-wheeler in my head and heart. And Rogowski is one of my heart throbs in the current league of actors. But even if I were to cast these two factors aside, the plot of the movie feels incomplete without the presence of that vintage racing bike. Tomas goes through the crests and troughs of relationship dilemmas, pedaling on not knowing where the bike or the evening will take him. The bike emotes for him, expresses on his behalf, saying in mechanical movements what words couldn’t possibly express, or what Tomas wouldn’t want to put to words.

In doing this, Ira Sachs, the director, is able to capture a very peculiar variety of an overtly aggressive European person who whizzes by coldly on sidewalks, often in a huff, running late for a meeting or on a delayed date. The person uses his bike to angrily ring the bell at someone on the sidewalk, or gently nudge them in the calf so they just about don’t fall. It’s a manner of expressing strong emotions and reactions in a matter of fact way while being reticent. And it feels like a thing we need to reach for more in our movies.

For decades movies across cultures have made statements with cars — their ownership, their dreams, their possession. These vehicles have been more than mere locomotives, they’ve also been rightful carriages of dreams, making some of us aim of owning one or more at some point or the other in life. As the planet continues to heat more than ever before (2025 was the third warmest year on record) it feels good to have a cinematic reference point for a character that expresses via his bike.

In Passages, the bike manages to convey the sleek sensuality of the Parisian roadside cafes, the deep hedonism of Tomas’ costumes and the eccentric cadences of his life as he sways between lovers. However hard I try, it is hard to capture the nearly slutty, literary vibrations of Tomas’ bike in a substack essay, yet we pedal on. While the movie perfectly defines the feelings of our generation when it comes to our love and aesthetic inner lives, through Tomas’ bike it also makes a rather bold statement about the whims and fancies of a director of his stature and command.

It helps that Passages is a “scorchingly sensual, exhilaratingly free, and brutally honest vision of romantic desire in all its raw, violent collisions” because it uses Tomas’ bike as the very urgent, necessary freedom of expression. Tomas is a rather curt man who can be manipulative, is a cheat but also easily gives his heart away. Rogowski’s magnetic personality and energetic physicality play equal parts. He keeps us engaged with his flamboyance and effervescence for which the bike is an accessory.

Passages encapsulates perfectly for me the way a bike can be an extension of someone’s personality, just the way a car can be. I know several other movies have cracked this well, but Passages’ method spoke volumes to me. It helps that Rogowski, the Berlin-resident, his himself a biker. Sachs said his biker avatar inspired him to rewrite the ending of the movie:

“(Franz) would always arrive out of breath on a bike, like, jumping a curb… . It inspired me to rewrite the end of the film with Franz as the kamikaze bike rider that he is.”

You lose these and it becomes apparent that Tomas is a bit of a shit. He is heady in his pursuit for love, people and the life of ideas. He’s totally selfish, ruthless and inattentive to the feelings of those around. The cycling to and from Agathe, the angrily pedaling away from Martin, the moments when he loses himself to unsaid thoughts whilst cycling. He does it all, but without bringing about any change in himself.

This is not to say that movies should take the onus of showing a more sustainable, climate friendly mode of transport when possible. This is also not to say that bikes and cycling should get as much screen space and screen time as their four-wheeler counterparts do or did. This is just to say that it’s just so soothing to see a character storm off in anger, not in a diesel four wall box that entirely covers them, but on a bike where even the slightest hint of tears in their eyes can be visible, if shown well.

While the movie received very well deserved praise for one of the best examples of contemporary costume design in recent memory, I feel the bike was left out as just another Europism. I believe the bike added a layer of insouciance to Tomas. I might lend to this idea a smidgen of my own romanticism about riding bikes, that perhaps when I do learn to ride one I will be the most free version of myself possible. But that shouldn’t take away from the movie, or Tomas and his bike for that matter.

Towards the end of the movie Tomas, rejected by both, is furious. He rides his bike with a hint of agony and despair, urgently racing down a curvaceous street to a remix version of La Marseillaise in the background. He knows he’s lost Martin and Agathe both, they have seen through him and yet in the way he rides that bike, the stealth, the swoosh, the swagger manages to earn him some dregs of empathy from me. He is not vulnerable, neither stoic. He just knows in that moment, that no matter what else he’s got his bike and maybe that’s all he needs. Maybe, or maybe not?

Passages is streaming on Mubi (in many countries).