Aventurina King

     There are worse families than ours and certain films are out there to prove it.  Ira Sachs’ new aesthetically challenged and attention-span challenging film, Forty Shades of Blue is successful at least in that respect.

     The father, Allen Jones (Rip Torn) is an ancient music legend who successfully enacts the local playboy role despite his hefty belly and a beard as scraggly as the third act King Lear’s.  His skeletal Russian girlfriend Laura (Dina Korzun) floats around their
Memphis mansion jangling her gold bracelets, a wine glass spilling through her lip-gloss.  Their three year old Sam sleeps in a bedroom somewhere.  And then, late off the plane strolls Allen’s first son.  Michael is a dashing but pensive high school English teacher whose arrival instantly heats up the mansion’s cold hell.  The ensuing humorless plot chronicles the ripples of Laura and Michael’s collision of the minds.

     The first scenes drag through one of Allen’s parties.  Ira Sachs’ obsessively used short lens camera pastes Laura’s figure in a crowd of cronies swaying to her boyfriend’s music and flat-humored yelps.  Allen then abandons her rigid figure and slips off to ingratiate a plumper singer with a joint and his beard.  Their laughter impresses on the soft rumble of soul music sifted into the hotel room.  Laura’s music is silence vanishing into the moan of the piano.  It hangs over her tipsy return home from the party and her frequent makeup touch ups.

     Enter Michael and her face suddenly overflows with a bubbling smile and hungry eyes.  Her laughing voice grabs at his attention.  He relinquishes it to her and the (up to then) pretty face who leaned on her rich man’s sleeve pulls out a profound and conflicted mind like a rabbit out of a top hat.  She is torn between the material debt she owes her cheating husband—”I don’t have a right to complain” she murmurs to Michael in the intimate night of her car “perhaps it is Russian, to keep on going”—and her growing lust for Michael.  Her character comes to life even though the crash into empathy-land is too brutal.

     What is really at stake in the movie though is not whether the poor woman will pick herself out of her psychological tangle but if, and how long it will take her to be tangled in Michael’s limbs.  She finally is.  It is a disappointing sequence: two heads bumping each other and breathing louder and louder until they exhale like a deflating party balloon. 

     During this scene, the camera sticks to the heads like an embarrassed witness who inadvertently got stuck in the same room as them. 

     In general, camera movement and attempts to make the film aesthetically pleasing are minimal.  Forty Shades of Blue slaloms effortlessly through the fabrics of its characters minds.  But it never comes out of the cerebral and the elements essential to its visual medium remain lackluster.