With
a camera that tarries Proust-like through the time and space
of the everyday
--the plastic decor of American hospitality,
quiet parking lots of hasty blow-jobs,
and the backwater bars of the rural South--the
luscious tenor of Ira Sachs' first feature film
stands in juxtaposition to the quietly violent
tale he narrates of a staccato exchange across race,
class, and culture. If the delta, the unpeopled
space of a Mississippi shore,
offers the hope for the suburban, white Lincoln(Shayne Gray)
and Afro-Amerasian John/Minh (Thang Chan)
to bridge the social categories that distinguish
them,
*The Delta* points instead to Lincoln's inability to occupy that
other space,
to the impulse that drives him back to the
sad comforts of home and that pushes John to play out
only another of the few scripted roles the society allows him.
Sachs
first snares us with the film's darling,
a delectable young Lincoln,
whose faux naivet* and uncomfortable relation to his own
sexuality wane as his unspoken complicity
with the racism of a 'multicultural' South gets writ large.
Like this transposition, the lingering beauty of Sachs' camera
reveals itself, like cold glass,
to be a brilliant instrument for freezing and rigidifying the
mobility of desire.
Starting the program on a lighter foot is Andrew Porter's humorous
commentary on youthful
desire and its domestic constraints, *Nobody I Know*. In this
wry Australian short,
faces tell a story far richer than the brief
dialogue as a frustrated teenager tries to turn a trick.
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