The Delta

The Delta

Ira Sachs wrote and directed this stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable 1996 independent feature. Like Spike Lee’s forthcoming He Got Game, the film focuses on an oedipal scenario that partially hinges on skin color. The central figure is Minh (Thang Chan), the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier, although his centrality isn’t apparent at first. Most of the first part of the film concerns a well-to-do, sexually confused teenager (Shayne Gray) who picks up Minh for sex, then goes off on a date with his steady girlfriend (whom he mainly ignores) before gravitating back to Minh much later. Because the wholly believable dialogue is more overheard than heard, and because Sachs is interested in showing us a whole Memphis milieu, Minh’s hatred for his father–a mirror image of the racism he encounters in the world around him–doesn’t seem as important at first as we eventually discover it is. If you think contemporary social reality rarely winds up in movies, this feature offers a bracing if mainly low-key exception to the rule. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 24 through 30.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Martin (Hache)

Martin (Hache)

An Argentinian film director exiled in Spain tries to become reacquainted with his son Martin (also known as “Hache”), who’s come to Madrid from Buenos Aires to recover from a drug overdose. Two other key characters in the story, and in many respects the most fascinating, are the director’s girlfriend and his gay best friend, who partially play the roles of surrogate parents for the boy. This excellent 1997 Argentinian-Spanish coproduction, directed by Adolfo Aristarain and shown at the last New York Film Festival, carries the kind of personal conviction, novelistic depth, and sense of lived experience that we seldom get in movies nowadays, including complex, three-dimensional characters and a plot that proves as unpredictable as they are. This is the only film I’ve seen at this year’s Chicago Latino Film Festival that I’d consider seeing a second time. (JR) Read more