Forty Shades Of Blue

Ira Sachs likes to approach his hometown of Memphis through an alien perspective: his previous feature, The Delta (1996), was about the son of a Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier, and this new one, which won the grand jury prize at Sundance, is about a young Russian woman (Dina Korzun of Last Resort) who’s moved in with an aging and neglectful rock star (Rip Torn), the father of her three-year-old son. The star’s grown son (Darren Burrows) comes home for a visit, throwing various oedipal issues into relief, and Sachs, who wrote the script with Michael Rohatyn, creates a fresh and unpredictable portrait of the mother. But the narrative doesn’t keep building on what it starts out with and stalls toward the end. 107 min. (JR)

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