Shady Family Does Little to Impress

Certainly, there are worse families than yours in the world, and certain films set out 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 plays the role of local playboy despite a hefty belly and scraggly beard. His skeletal Russian girlfriend Laura (Dina Korzun) floats around their Memphis mansion jangling her gold bracelets, wine spilling through her lip gloss. Their three-year-old son Sam sleeps in a bedroom somewhere. And then, late off the plane, strolls Allen's first son. Enter Michael, a dashing but pensive high school English teacher whose arrival instantly heats up the mansion's cold hell. The ensuing humorless plot chronicles the rippling effects of the collision of Laura and Michael's minds.

The first scenes drag the viewer through one of Allen's parties. Ira Sachs' obsessive use of a 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 himself to a plumper singer with a joint. Their laughter sounds against the soft rumble of soul music sifted into the hotel room.

As soon as Laura she sees Michael, her face suddenly overflows with a bubbling smile and hungry eyes. Her laughing voice grabs at his attention and he turns to her. Quickly, Laura reveals the conflicted mind behind her pretty face. She is torn between the material debt she owes her cheating husband and her growing lust for Michael. "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." But though her character begins to come to life, the attempt to attain empathy is too forced.

What is really at stake in the movie, though, is not whether the poor woman will pick herself out of her psychological tangle, but how long it will take her to end up tangled in Michael's limbs. When she finally gives in, it is a disappointing sequence: two heads bumping each other and breathing louder and louder until they exhale like a deflating party balloon, as if the camera is embarrassed to venture beyond their heads.

In general, the film makes only minimal attempts to be aesthetically pleasing. Forty Shades of Blue slaloms effortlessly through the fabrics of its characters minds, but it never emerges from the cerebral, with the elements essential to its visual medium remaining lackluster.