Dreary drama
Forty Shades of Blue is touching, realistic
Jeanne Fronda Staff
There’s something fascinating about other people’s love lives, especially when an incestuous affair is involved.
In Forty Shades of Blue, director Ira Sachs’ award-winning drama (winner of the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival), we see how isolation can propel a person to seek affection. A beautiful, young Russian woman named Laura (Dina Korzun) feels isolated even though she lives in an opulent mansion with her older boyfriend, a legendary blues-rock musician named Alan James (Rip Torn). The couple lives in Memphis, Tennessee with their three-year-old son, Sam. Laura finds herself yearning for more, and her life changes after Michael, a literature professor and Alan’s estranged older son from a previous marriage, visits the couple. Soon an incestuous affair between Laura and Michael develops. But who could really blame Laura for wanting attention from another man?
For most of the movie Laura is alone, and Alan makes sure of that, with his short temper and habit of leaving the room to ignore her. Whether it’s browsing the cosmetics and fragrance counters at department stores, taking care of Sam or writing long missives to herself in her journal while she’s sprawled out on her bed, Laura is usually alone. Even when she is surrounded by other people, such as when she attends a special tribute event honouring her husband, she ends up strolling in the empty hotel hallways by her lonesome while her husband is off schmoozing with fans and longtime friends.
Ultimately, Laura seems separate from those around her, and Sachs makes us believe she’s overly-focused on her physical appearance, as we see several shots of her applying makeup, fixing her jewelry or looking herself over in mirrors.
Showing Laura by herself most of the time makes the beginning of the movie a bit sluggish; we don’t really care about Laura until half way through the film, when we realise that she is not just concerned about her appearance and that she doesn’t have friends or hobbies that can distract her from her feelings of emptiness.
“A beautiful, wonderful woman should always be in a wonderful state,” Alan says to Laura, ignoring the fact that she has a right to a range of emotions.
“Maybe it’s good for me,” Laura says about her unhappy feelings.
Perhaps having an affair isn’t the answer to feelings of emptiness, but given Laura’s limited social contacts — the only people we really see her talk to are the maid, the babysitter, her immediate family and Alan’s friends — it’s easy for her to find superficial or temporary attachments among her present acquaintances.
Granted, Laura doesn’t make the best decisions about whom she gives attention: one night she lets a complete stranger drive her home when she’s a teetering drunk and later on she has an evening tryst in the woods with a longtime friend of her husband’s. But any sort of connection or attention seems better than none at all, especially when she’s easily forgotten by people when in the presence of her famous beau.
Although Rip Torn gives a convincing performance as a hot-tempered blues musician, as he yells at the top of his lungs when something goes awry in the recording studio, there’s a slight “ew” factor when we see him frolicking in bed with two much younger women: once with Laura and, on a separate occasion, with one of his fans. (Hey, the older man-younger woman relationship isn’t something that’s frowned upon, but there’s just something unattractive about the image of a sweaty, older man wearing a tank top having sex with his also clothed girlfriend, both of whom are covered by a bed sheet.)
Despite the fact that it moves a bit slowly at first and that it seems like a “woe-is-me, I’m-a-lonely-beautiful-homemaker” (gee, someone should make a show about that), Forty Shades of Blue is a touching, realistic story about a woman who has much more to offer than her beauty.
You can catch Forty Shades of Blue at Cinematheque from March 18 to 23.
