40 Shades of Blue

With its grainy camera work and overabundance of lingering, meaningful looks between mostly unlikeable characters, Ira Sachs’ Forty Shades of Blue slopes onto the screen with a cigarillo in its hand and a back pocket crammed with indie-drama dysfunction.

  We are introduced to Alan James, played by the increasingly grizzled and Pavarotti-esque Rip Torn, a Memphis music legend being honoured by his fawning peers for his services to the scene. We also meet his beautiful Russian girlfriend, Laura (Dina Korzun), whom he flagrantly cheats on, and we learn that his estranged son Michael (Darren Burrows) is coming to visit for a while. After the opening party, a drunken, deserted Laura is brought home by a lecherous stranger whom she eventually kicks out of the house. Michael, who has arrived while the couple attended the party, watches from his bedroom door. His hostility towards Laura the next day quickly turns into something else as he is revealed to be an unhappy husband, expectant father, angry son and bitter teacher. Laura’s unrealised dreams, and empty marriage to Alan, lead her to embark on a confused, primal affair with her potential son-in-law.

  Forty Shades of Blue is another indie film, which covers the same ground of melancholy and emotional repression as many other indie films. While Robert Altman examined this musical territory in his splendid Nashville, Sachs’ film, with its decidedly French New Wave air of broodiness and unspoken desire permeating proceedings, is the antithesis of Altman’s dialogue-heavy, snappy work.

 While the pacing is slow, the acting, however, is superb with Kurzon cutting a lonely, wounded figure whose American dream has not unfolded quite as neatly as she might have dreamt. Torn’s ability to impress in any role, from Dodgeball to The Larry Sanders Show, is once more on display here, but in a film featuring so many supposedly complex characters it all falls a bit flat too often. It is difficult to like anyone here, and without the comic edge of something like The Squid and the Whale, the relentlessly downbeat scenes without resolution or confrontation, leave you feeling apathetic and indifferent to the storyline.