The Stuff of the Blues

Forty Shades of Blue

Directed by Ira Sachs

Capote

Directed by Bennett Miller

In 1997, the year critics flipped over the noir clichés and neocon racism of L.A. Confidential, Ira Sachs made The Delta, a psychologically dark, mostly night-set meditation on the sexual habits of a closeted white youth and a biracial African American?Vietnamese youth who cross paths in Memphis. It was an uncool setting for a crime movie but a perfect locale for examining the confluence of sex, race and class in modern America. For those intrepid few who saw it, The Delta shamed the fashionable retro-cynicism of L.A. Confidential. Critics paid Sachs back by ignoring his breakthrough.

That history tells what indie culture really means. Critics too readily extol small-minded films that cozy up to the biases of aspiring class grant-seekers and trust-funders who wear "indie" t-shirts for irony, all the time ignoring what America's really like. With The Delta, Sachs got under a viewer's skin and questioned those race/class/sexual assumptions newly "uncovered" by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, Sachs has remained an outsider-a cultural refugee-until last January when Forty Shades of Blue, his first feature since The Delta, won the Sundance Grand Prize. (It opens at Film Forum eight months late.) Seeming to hew closer to convention, Sachs tells a hetero story of a Russian immigrant, Laura (Dina Korzun), who finds herself the trophy wife of a country music producer, Alan James (Rip Torn). In Memphis again, Sachs innovates another bluegrass confidential revealing Laura's dissatisfaction: She's out of place (a frustrated songwriter laboring within an idiosyncratic idiom) and overwhelmed by her own damned luck.

Sachs sees human experience as a demonstration of damned luck. Laura, a literal and spiritual foreigner, is so drained of happiness she seems ghostlike, especially when gaily dressed for a night out, dutifully mocking her own distress. Her misery suggests a haunting global catastrophe. Yet Sachs' exacting details of Southern atmosphere and individual eccentricity makes Laura's peculiar circumstance believable and authentic.

Who said Americana could only be about the native-born? The rough compromises and bad choices in Laura's marriage reflect other recognizably human errors, especially when Alan James' adult son, Michael (Darren Burrows) returns home harboring doubts, anger and lust. At an outdoor picnic gathering, Sachs' foreshortened panorama compresses all the gnarly relationships into one shot. Visually, palpably, it is the stuff of the blues: Heartbreak is all around and, befitting the musical setting, all sadness is made effable.

Boasting about his involvement with "'race music,' the music Europe is going crazy over 'cause it's the real deal," Alan James suggests Sachs' own wise appreciation for the essence of American experience. Even in unlikely situations, Sachs has a feel for genuine behavior that makes him extraordinary. His triangulated characters' sorrows seem fresh. They each convey a sense of being hurt, unfulfilled-lost. "You don't judge me and that is more important than knowing me," Laura tells Michael. It's the same realization that freaked out The Delta's outsiders, causing unforgettable tragedy. And once again Sachs comes through with a sex scene that is foremost about individual need, unnerving in its sense of isolation and distance. He shames Cronenberg's licentious staircase rape scene in A History of Violence. The difference is crucial: Forty Shades is by a superior artist interested in depicting true emotional intimacy.

Last week I mentioned Lionel Baier's Garçon Stupide, a breakthrough as unexpected and underappreciated as was The Delta. There may be similar reasons why: Baier's central characterization reveals what other indie films avoid. The protagonist Loïc (Pierre Chatagny) is unenviably naïve-maybe obtuse-but Baier remains nonjudgmental. Balancing documentary realism and cogent drama, Baier presents an archetypal modern youth as well as announcing his own commitment to getting dramatically closer, emotionally inside.

When a friend mocks Loïc's sudden interest in Impressionism as a doofus response to a trick calling him "impressionable," it is the most complex demonstration of pity recently put on screen. Chatagny's performance-a phenomenally open face and unfilled mind-sustains Baier's connection of illiteracy to moral ignorance. He personifies the emotional bankruptcy that the post-communist era has bequeathed to the current generation. Baier avoids giving sexually wreckless Loïc a hot-topic burden like AIDS (just as Sachs avoided having his Delta characters suffer an obvious calamity); there's a deeper empathy at work. The final dazzling sequence of Loïc searching through a carnival called L'Enfer (Hell) brings to mind the Flesh Fair sequence in A.I. where a figure of human longing grasped after love and self-knowledge.

Like Sachs, Baier uses indie cinema to advance past conventional movie sentiments. He is the unseen videographer/trick who advises Loïc that being in love is "seeing things from a different angle." Baier and Sachs are both independent artists bringing new angles to cinema. You must see it. There are more references and reinventions of cultural heritage in Garçon Stupide than in any other film so far this year. A dictionary juxtaposition of Hitchcock and Hitler points out the need for enlightenment snidely disregarded by Gus Van Sant's recent films for hipster insiders. A deconstructed, split-screen sex scene recreates the classic Falcon video Fourgy while intercutting Fassbinder-style factory symbols backed by Trent Reznor-style dehumanized rhythms: It's political, analytical, awesome. This year an Ira Sachs Award should go to Lionel Baier.

The best film I saw at the recently ended New Montreal Film Festival was Catherine Binet's Secret Tales or The Rohmerians, a series of interviews with 16 of Eric Rohmer's most emblematic actors. Binet showcased the intelligence of performers who were inspired by Rohmer's discreet yet profound explorations into Cupid and Psyche. Watching gloriously-aged Françoise Fabian and Jean-Louis Trintignant discuss My Night at Maud's; the still stunning Arielle Dombasle and Pascal Greggory explicate Pauline at the Beach; and Melvil Poupaud and Amanda Langlet reigniting the flame of A Tale of Summer was thrilling. And yet, it brought back the disaster of Capote.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman's stunt movie proves how craven and anti-intellectual the American acting profession has become. If Hoffman and screenwriter Dan Futterman were really interested in exploring the diminutive literary prodigy and social gadabout, they wouldn't have submerged character-study beneath the sensationalism of the Clutter family murders that Truman Capote chronicled in In Cold Blood (not his most representative book, just the most exploitable). They're uninterested in how a man of Capote's kind and time could be shaken by horrific events; they only depict the hubbub, hype and flirtation that preceded the book's publication. ("This will change the way people write!" Capote's editor brags, unconcerned with how the domestication of mass murder might change the way people thought.)

Hoffman's entire performance is on his knees (begging), utilizing his perpetual albino aura. Not just a new Dustin Hoffman, he's our Charles Laughton doing more acting than others would dare and more than is necessary. Director Bennett Miller closes in on every tic (even Catherine Keener's humdrum turn as Capote's beard among the Midwestern rubes). Capote won't be complete until Hoffman makes his Oscar season rounds, burnishing the shameless display. Blame Roger Ebert (Hoffman's next role?) for overpraising Monster. Now all SAG's a madhouse.