Brilliant Blue

By Dan Sallitt When asked to defend Forty Shades of Blue (and it seems to need defending: it’s one of those “critics’ films” that civilians often find depressing or uneventful), one is tempted to say, “But it looks so amazing! Don’t you get lost in the images?” On further reflection, one sees that director Ira Sachs’ visual style relates to other aspects of his sensibility and isn’t just a way of prettying things up. But there remains something risky and elusive about his approach, something that works over and around his narrative material rather than through it. The script, by Sachs and Michael Rohatyn (a composer who did the music for Sachs’ fine debut feature, 1996’s The Delta), tells the old story of a father and son competing for the same woman. In an exceptional performance that blends his familiar persona with a subtle regional impersonation, Rip Torn plays Alan James, a celebrated Memphis music producer of the Dan Penn-Chips Moman generation who has a child with his much younger Russian girlfriend Laura (Dina Korzun, of Last Resort). A gregarious but difficult man, Alan has a strained relationship with his son Michael (Darren Burrows), who returns to Memphis for a visit, full of misgivings about his own marriage and soon-to-be-born child. Laura, a practical gal who has never questioned her relationship with Alan, inevitably strikes sparks with the withdrawn, enigmatic Michael—but both lovers carry so much baggage that it’s impossible to diagnose true love, opportunistic fling or transition-guy syndrome. The script, by Sachs and Michael Rohatyn (a composer who did the music for Sachs’ fine debut feature, 1996’s The Delta), tells the old story of a father and son competing for the same woman. In an exceptional performance that blends his familiar persona with a subtle regional impersonation, Rip Torn plays Alan James, a celebrated Memphis music producer of the Dan Penn-Chips Moman generation who has a child with his much younger Russian girlfriend Laura (Dina Korzun, of Last Resort). A gregarious but difficult man, Alan has a strained relationship with his son Michael (Darren Burrows), who returns to Memphis for a visit, full of misgivings about his own marriage and soon-to-be-born child. Laura, a practical gal who has never questioned her relationship with Alan, inevitably strikes sparks with the withdrawn, enigmatic Michael—but both lovers carry so much baggage that it’s impossible to diagnose true love, opportunistic fling or transition-guy syndrome. The storytelling clearly establishes Laura as the film’s organizing, though remote, consciousness. We see her drift through a series of luxurious environments, carrying her natural sense of solitude and removal around her like a bubble. Whether because of a permanent case of culture shock or a touch of autism, she seems out of place even in her own house. As in The Delta, much of Sachs’ attention goes to populating those environments. He has a documentary impulse that makes his depictions of Alan’s Memphis music circle, and of Memphis social life in general, as much of a focus as the triangular drama up front. The bits of background business that would pose difficulties for many filmmakers—random phone conversations and work interactions, the extroverted demonstrations of affection among the musicians, the amiably alcoholic tone of Memphian social gatherings—are inventive and spontaneous. One wonders how Sachs blends scripting and improvisation to arrive at this pleasing fiction-documentary amalgam. This interesting competition between figure and ground is heightened by the film’s visual plan, which relies heavily on telephoto lenses that compress the images so that background detail impinges on the foreground elements. Eschewing the looser visual schemes that we associate with long lenses, Sachs cultivates a carefully composed telephoto stasis, isolating the characters in the midst of teeming detail. Sachs and cinematographer Julian Whatley make superb use of fast film stock that requires very little light (with a bit more grain in the image as a tradeoff), so that the vast visual fields are filled with light sources and distant points of illumination. At times the film feels doused in light; elsewhere, the protagonists receive only soft, indirect lighting that leaves them partially illuminated against an aquarium-like background. Everything about Forty Shades of Blue, from the mystery-laden performances to the attention-stealing richness of the social context to the compressed, diverse images, has the effect of undermining the primacy of the plot, giving the drama a ghostly, incomplete tone. And the drama cooperates by failing to resolve along any of the conventional lines that the archetypal story suggests. What looks at first like a tale of great, forbidden love might ultimately be no more than the story of a nice, pragmatic Russian girl spoiled by the American craving for total fulfillment.