Review by Bjorn B.
By: Bjorn B.
I've always loved Russell Tovey and, as usual, he's great in this film. Unfortunately, the movie is in an English dialect that is very difficult to understand and I'm pretty good with English accents and dialects.. I probably understood 1 out of ever...
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I've always loved Russell Tovey and, as usual, he's great in this film. Unfortunately, the movie is in an English dialect that is very difficult to understand and I'm pretty good with English accents and dialects.. I probably understood 1 out of every 3 words. This movie should have subtitles.
Review by Wharton 50
By: Wharton 50
I recently purchased this movie from the UK because America takes so long to get everything on the scale of 1 to 10 the movie is a 10 the actors were superb every professional football player basketball player baseball player should see this movie k...
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I recently purchased this movie from the UK because America takes so long to get everything on the scale of 1 to 10 the movie is a 10 the actors were superb every professional football player basketball player baseball player should see this movie kudos to the director I will recommend this movie to all my friends
Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
"The Pass"
Football, Homosexuality and Masculinity
Amos Lassen
Nineteen-year-old Jason and Ade have been in the Academy of a famous London football club since they were eight years old. On the night before a Champions...
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"The Pass"
Football, Homosexuality and Masculinity
Amos Lassen
Nineteen-year-old Jason and Ade have been in the Academy of a famous London football club since they were eight years old. On the night before a Champions League match, they're in a hotel room in Romania. They are too excited to so instead they skip, fight, mock each other, prepare their kit and watch a teammate's sex tape. Suddenly, one of them kisses the other. The impact of this or as it becomes known 'pass' is with both of them through the next ten years of their lives in which they experienced fame and failure and secrets and lies. We all know that it the world of sports, image is everything.
Jason (Russell Tovey) is unable to reconcile his homosexuality with football and "The Pass" is a very reflection on the shortcomings of the gay community and the football world, and how they have mostly failed to co-exist harmoniously. If you remember, Tovey once criticized effeminate gay men and bragged about being muscular and masculine. Here he does exactly what caused him to have so much criticism--- he feigns masculinity. His performance is very energized, repulsively overconfident and grotesquely masculine.
The film opens with Jason and fellow footballer Ade (Arinze Kene) in a hotel room. They are in their underwear and engaging in horseplay. As time passes, their playfulness destiny takes twisted and unexpected turns. Director Ben Williams examines the dilemmas and split life of Jason throughout the years and the difficult choices he has to make. The "pass" of the title refers to the games played on the pitch as well as "crossing the line" in real life. Football is one of the last and strongest bastions of homophobia in the UK, and here were are reminded that society still has some way to go before homosexuality is truly accepted. The film is above all a look at English obsessions (football, celebrity culture, wealth, voyeurism and fitness) and how futile and they can become. Williams examines and exposes the pathology of all of them. The film holds a mirror to gay footballers and their homophobic counterparts. We see that where footballers feel as though they're unable to come out and the film looks at an ugly side of the sport.
Jason is an idealistic, ambitious 19-year-old footballer, who has come through the academy alongside his oldest friend Ade. It is the night before a Champion's League fixture and if they are chosen the match would be their very first appearance. The two men share a kiss. We then fast forward five years and then five years again and Jason still hasn't come out publicly--- neither has he come to terms personally with the fact he's gay. He has been living a lie and frightened to be himself in the culture of football.
Instead of looking at the public, director Williams, and writer John Donnelly, have created a unique and intriguing way to study this theme. They go inside the minds of the two protagonists. We have three individual, fixed settings in which the pair discuss football. The two leading performances ensure that this remains watchable especially Jason who comes across as a truly reprehensible figure, distinctly unlikeable, egotistic, selfish and a bully. However, the way he plays the role makes him somewhat empathetic. The pain he gets from his secret sexuality is palpable, particularly in the way he attempts to convince himself that he's straight, leading a life of denial at the expense of his former bond with Ade.
When the two are in a Romanian hotel room the night before a big match, young Jason expresses his determination to get to the very top of premiership football. His teammate Ade is no less keen, warning Jason that on the playing field in tomorrow's crucial game, it's every man for himself, as far as getting noticed by talent scouts goes. Jason apparently more than agrees and is prepared to extend his ambitious posturing to every area of his life, not just the pitch. Wearing only tight underwear and a mocking smile, Jason banters ambiguously with his rival, whose attempts to respond in kind are undercut by a sweet insistence on taking everything a little more sincerely than Jason.
"The Pass" keeps a formal three-act structure with five years passing between each of three self-contained chapters. We become aware of Jason's success by the increasing grandeur of the hotel rooms. He is something of a bird in a gilded cage his status as a bird in a gilded cage. In the final-act the suite is luxuriously appointed, but the room's heavy curtains are closely drawn with the outside world barely figuring in a claustrophobic parallel with Jason's repressed sexual energy. In the first and third sections of the film, it is just the two men.
It is in the section or action that comes five years after the first hotel room that Jason seems to be dealing with devastating emotional consequences for Jason, though it is unlikely that kiss alone had been the sole trigger. Here we have a frustrated attempt to hire club dancer Lyndsey (Lisa McGrillis) to film having sex with Jason with the intention being to deliberately leak it to the press to quash rumors of his sexuality. We see Jason's depths of despair and denial he has sunk to. Lyndsey figures out what is going and Jason offers only a seething certainty that he isn't gay, because he cannot afford to be because of football contracts, young fans and merchandise arrangements: Jason believes that if his sexuality becomes public, he will lose it all. But it isn't just cold-hearted economic considerations at play here, Jason is a prisoner of a terrible dilemma. Football is his dream yet his own desires put it at risk.
He is at war with his own body and mind, and Tovey, both in this section and the next five-year jump, emotes a kind of brutal l weathering and pent up whirlwind of feelings, which he keeps hidden under a shield of machismo. When Lyndsey realizes what is going on is among the high points in a film that has such fine performances. The kiss opens up all sorts of interesting and provocative questions - not just about what is going to happen to these two men currently striving in a sport that prizes heteronormativity and extreme masculinity (which the film teases is a front for a lot of hypocrisy and denial under the image of those rippling torsos), but also about the nature of their relationship. When did the line between friend and lover get truly crossed?