For most audiences, writer-director Ira Sachs first landed on their radars with the 2005 independent drama Forty Shades of Blue. The film introduced the patient style, realistic approach to dialogue and nuanced treatment of adult relationships — gay and straight alike — that would resurface throughout a mostly unimpeachable filmography. Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange, Little Men, Passages and last year’s Peter Jujar’s Day are regarded as eminent 21st century American indies, all showcases for the director’s unflashy style and lived-in naturalism.
It recently came to my surprise and attention, thanks to the Criterion Collection, that Sachs had completed his feature debut some nine years prior to Forty Shades of Blue. The Delta ($27.96 Blu-ray, or streaming on the Criterion Channel), shot on 16mm in Sachs’ hometown of Memphis, finds the budding artist at his most formally experimental. Under the influence of John Cassavetes and underground experimental cinema, The Delta is full of richly observed moments, region-specific insights and shocking twists all the way down to its final seconds, while defiantly throwing out the rules for what’s necessary in a “well-written” script.
The Delta chronicles the lead-up to, and later the fallout from, a chance meeting between two young gay men. But its general plot description suggest a more action-driven, or even more psychologically propelled, feature than the slippery work of broken poetry Sachs has gifted us. For the first nearly third of its 85-minute running time, The Delta is all ambience and little plot.
Eighteen-year-old protagonist Lincoln Bloom (Shayne Gray) spends his nights at a cruising spot off the highway, his nocturnal wanderings presented as a collage of cricket choruses, car headlights, idle gatherings and furtive hookups. Or he hangs out with friends — smoking pot, drinking out of paper bags, visiting a punk club, mumbling through dialogue at a house party. We seem to be waiting for something to happen alongside the characters, but the aimlessness is the point. It’s a cacophony of youthful rebellion without a cause — a lost 1990s ur-indie that distills the peak Sundance era.
Meanwhile, in his “straight” coexistence, Lincoln lives with an insufferable family of casual Southern racists, and tries to pass as hetero with his girlfriend Monica (Rachel Zan Huss), for whom he professes his love in unconvincing, overcompensating ways. At night, Lincoln may be looking for action, but he’s not desperate. He’s picked up by a masochistic older man with a daddy kink, and decides he wants none of it, in an awkward seduction scene that Sachs presents in real time, with no score and with almost no cuts, marinating in Lincoln’s discomfort. (Sachs says in a bonus interview included in the disc that he based Lincoln on himself.)
Finally, while lingering outside an adult theater, Lincoln meets the character with whom he’ll share the most screen time: “John,” the name taken by Vietnamese immigrant Minh Nguyen (Thang Chan), who unlike Lincoln is openly gay, unashamed, and guileless in his wants and affections, even if he delivers them in imperfect English. They spend a night together that involves visiting Lincoln’s family’s boat, buying black-market fireworks, and fleeing a police officer through a forest, leading to a pivotal moment of shame and betrayal.
Chan, a nonprofessional actor in his only role, is such a compelling presence, his forthright stares penetrating through Lincoln and directly into the camera and its audience, that one wonders how much of his characterization is scripted and how much is an outgrowth of Chan’s intuitive choices. In the supplementary interview, Sachs reveals that he extended the original screenplay to feature scenes with Chan’s character more prominently. This decision anchors the movie’s three-act structure, bookending it with Lincoln’s and Chan’s separate stories, and having them collide in the middle.
Chan, we learn, lives among a seemingly open community of Vietnamese immigrants — his roommate, accepting of his sexuality, playfully calls him a “slut” — but his life is anything but charmed. The Delta culminates in an act of sudden, de-dramatized violence as shocking as the climax to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and coming from a similar place: the ennui and frustration of the exploited and marginalized.
The Delta was not universally loved by the few critics who saw it (Rotten Tomatoes has compiled only eight reviews). Some felt that depicting queer characters acting in violent or predatory ways reinforced negative stereotypes at a time when being LGBTQ was less accepted than it is today. I’m more in the camp of Sachs, who argues in this disc’s interview with critic Keith Uhlich that the most honest depiction of anyone, gay or straight, should wrestle with the full spectrum of human behavior.
Granted, Sachs himself would take different directions as he aged into the filmmaker he became in the aughts; such scenes as The Delta’s shock ending would certainly not fit into the aesthetic of Love is Strange or Little Men. But the experience of making it was formative. He looks back on The Delta as “a conversation I wanted to have about all the things I couldn’t talk about.” I’m grateful more cineastes now have the opportunity to engage in that conversation.