New York Times and others on "Forty Shades"

A. O. Scott of The New York Times waxes favorably about "Forty Shades of Blue":

"Forty Shades of Blue," which won the top prize at Sundance this year, is one of the few American films to come out of that festival that deal with the agonies of adulthood rather than adolescence. (Unlike "Hustle & Flow," the other recent Sundance prizewinner set in Memphis, this film is more concerned with the realities of emotional failure than with fantasies of show-business success).

Alan, Laura and Michael have complicated motives and needs, and Mr. Sachs views each with a mixture of sympathy and detachment, allowing their relationships to tangle and ramify through a series of long, quiet, carefully observed scenes. They remain mysterious to one another, to us and also to themselves, while remaining grounded in painful and recognizable situations. Laura, whose pain is most acute, is also the most enigmatic, since she is trapped in a second language, as well as in her own beauty.

Memphis itself takes on something of the dimensions of a character in the film, insinuating its history and personality into the story and giving it a rough, lived-in texture as well as a musical lilt that helps its sorrows go down a little easier - at least for the audience.

The New York Press raves: "Forty Shades is by a superior artist interested in depicting true emotional intimacy." It further makes approving reference to Ira's "The Delta" (1997). But there's also this passage: "Sachs tells a hetero story of a Russian immigrant, Laura (Dina Korzun), who finds herself the trophy wife of a country music producer, Alan James (Rip Torn). In Memphis again, Sachs innovates another bluegrass confidential revealing Laura's dissatisfaction: She's out of place (a frustrated songwriter laboring within an idiosyncratic idiom) and overwhelmed by her own damned luck."

Country music? Bluegrass?

And the Newark Star Ledger chimes in:

Sachs films all this with a hasty, sometimes barely focused camera, as if to give it a documentary feel. It's an eye-catching technique, and may have something to do with this having won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, over the far-better Memphis music story, "Hustle & Flow." But gritty touches aside, this is still a soap-opera story at its core.