Forty Shades of Blue (2005): B+

As with his debut The Delta, writer/director Ira Sachs’ Forty Shades of Blue proves preoccupied with characters who are both socially and emotionally estranged from their Southern surroundings. Sachs’ reserved film details the morose travails of Laura (Dina Korzun), the Russian-born girlfriend of record producer Alan James (Rip Torn), a lousy father to Laura’s young son as well as to his bitter adult offspring Michael (Northern Exposure’s Darren Burrows), recently returned home to escape his own crumbling marriage. Because Laura’s unhappy relationship with Alan provides her with the wealth and comfort she didn’t have in her native land, she suffers her misery without complaints, and Sachs conveys the range of sadness felt by all three characters (whose relationships eventually intertwine in predictably messy fashion) through measured takes, patient pacing, and supple editing. Images of Korzun’s stylishly dressed blond beauty sticking out in her Memphis environs speak to the film’s fixation on isolation, and though Sachs’s writing often posits only sparse motivations for these lonely people’s behavior, the prickly emotions coursing throughout Forty Shades of Blue – supplied less by Torn and Burrows (too showy and blunt, respectively) than by the magnificent Korzun in a performance of internalized anguish – are nonetheless enough to sustain its sometimes-murky melodrama.