.. if Russian women are purported to be highly educated and intelligent.. then this one for sure must be one of the very dumb ones... she's living with a guy thirty years older, has a kid with him, then proceeds to have an affair with his eldest son, who is nearer her age, and who's married with a family of his own... oh yea, to top it all off, she goes ahead and falls in love with him.. and near the end drops a line blowing up all their futures.. someone worked really hard on this fantasy plot.. more like Forty Shades of Stupidity.. if it garnered any kind of buzz/attention.. it could only be because of the likes of a Rip Torn, otherwise most would not be paying much attention at all.. it's a kind '5'

40 Shades of Blue is a good character drama. Shot with grainier resolution (digital hand-held maybe?), it's earthy as are it's characters. The main ones are an interesting mix, with a foreigner Dina Korzen playing a mixed up but seducing dyed blonde Russian - and the lead. She is tall, gaunt, and looks malnourishy-thin. Without going in too much of the story I also enjoyed Darren Burrows performance as a ticked-off son. One scene towards then end lifted the movie from a 6 to a 7. It was a particularly well done climactic scene between the above mentioned 2. Rip Torn as the father is loud, obnoxious, and almost an afterthought. Of course thats what helps build tension. The dysfunctionality of the family is surely lowly. Still there's a lot of beautifully shot sequences and some poignant dialogue. Worth a watch, if you don't mind a bit of a slow pacing.

interested to see the comments about boredom and apathy. for me, that's what makes it painful, on a certain scale worth exploring. those "hints" only of pathos, the withholding of basic human emotion, the absence of basic communication and some basic caretaking instincts (with the exception of somewhat successful attempts at sporadic parenting). i know from personal experience that a certain superficial world (alongside many gorgeous, fulfilling worlds) -- existing as it does around the very art that expresses the great suffering and joy of our culture (i.e., blues and other idioms) -- causes visceral pain if one tries to jump in, unaware and unprotected. viewers may feel that vulnerability and become quite disturbed. such a creative-world of superficiality, it seems, usually results from cumulative effect of chemicals (drugs, booze), money (denied... or accepted without feeling worthy or knowing what to do with it), or promises unfulfilled for artists and others around them who don't make it quite the way they planned. complicate that with a very distinct set of circumstances that worldly Russian female émigrés understand all too well, and there is no choice but to tell an insecure story in a wavy, unresolved way. i live in hope. always hope. but i thought the film was brilliant. its examples of every single nerve crying out for attention were succinct. i did not think the characters were unworthy of redemption, though i "liked" some more than others. redemption doesn't have to come in the movie. and god knows for some it never comes. i'm crazy about the terrific music. suffice it to say memphis blues + rip torn + an intelligent plot of unrelenting human drama equal a no brainer for me.

What's great about seeing films as part of a film festival is that most of the time they've received little or no advance word-of-mouth. For me that makes encountering such films a very pure experience, having no expectations, just open to whatever story the filmmaker wants to tell. I hand myself over to the film and see where it takes me.Within 15 or 20 minutes of watching this film, where it took me was straight to my left wrist to check my watch. For me, watching this turtle crawl was one of the more excruciating experiences I've had in a theater.Spoiler warning, as above, and now here's the problem: a boring lead character who is bored and depressed spends the length of the film bored and depressed and ends the film bored and depressed. Guess where the audience winds up?What's fascinating about the film for me is the director's insistence upon scenes that literally do nothing a go nowhere, telling us nothing. In one interminable sequence, our heroine walks around, looks at furniture, lays down on a bed, looks at the ceiling, stares at nothing, you get the point. With each edit the audience anticipates-- perhaps even prays for-- something, anything to happen in the next scene and there is literally no payoff.Case in point: laboriously, slowly, she makes her way to a closet to pull a journal off a shelf. What will be in it? Some secret we don't know? Alas, it's a blank page. Now she's grabbing a pencil. What will she write? Is this her suicide note? Alas, we don't get to see what she's writing. Will it materialize later in the film? A crucial plot point to be revealed at film's end? No. Unfortunately this waste of 5 - 10 minutes of screen time literally goes nowhere, tells us nothing, and provides no break to the depressive monotony of the 90 minutes preceding it.She's dropping her kid off at the day care. What will she do? What will happen? Nothing.This is the case the entire film. It got to the point where the pointless culmination of each exhausting sequence elicited derisive snickering from those around me in the theater. As we exited, a thirtysomething woman behind me commented, "Every one of those people needed some caffeine or some prozac." Hear, hear. As did the audience by that point.I don't know the work of Sachs, but it seems that Sachs was aggressively bound to make a film that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Sachs would make a film in which our heroine makes no journey, learns nothing of herself, and winds up depressed and miserable, precisely where she started. With claustrophobic framing, dark and dreary colors, and an almost pervasive lack of music to break or enhance the mood, it's almost like Sachs was determined to leave the audience miserable as well.Even the brilliant Rip Torn can't elevate this pointless dreck above the sensory experience of watching wallpaper dry.