Blue moon

TWO DOORS DOWN from Sam Phillips's house and two blocks from Willie Mitchell's – that's where you'll find the home that, in Forty Shades of Blue, belongs to gruff music industry legend Alan James (Rip Torn). Born and raised in Memphis, Tenn., director Ira Sachs was able to dig deep into the area's real-life soul settings as a backdrop for drama: The man behind the bass lick of "Shaft" – Charlie "Skip" Pitts – exchanges bad-mouth banter with Alan. Argent Studios, where Al Green and Big Star cut their classic albums, is the site where the gruff Alan throws a fit early on in the movie.

"If you listen to Sam Phillips and [Big Star producer] Jim Dickinson, their use of language is so beautiful," opines the soft-spoken Sachs, interviewed in the front row of a movie theater during a recent Bay Area visit. "You think, 'I can't believe those words just tumbled out of your mouth.' " A Forty Shades scene in which Alan offhandedly likens a singer to a bird with clipped wings has a similar quality.

While Memphis soul figures heavily in Forty Shades' initial scenes, it isn't the only music that gives the film its heart. To accentuate the chilled emotional reaches of Alan's oft-solitary trophy girlfriend, Laura (Dina Korzun), Sachs called upon Dickon Hinchliffe, best known for his scores – both solo and as a member of the Tindersticks – for Claire Denis. "It's so abstract to conjure emotion out of notes – it's unearthly in a way that filmmaking isn't," says Sachs, who agrees with this writer that Hinchliffe's score for Denis's Friday Night is one of the loveliest in recent years. "Filmmaking is people, cameras, scripts, writing, and instinct – there's something very physical about it."

In both of his films, Sachs, an admirer of Ken Loach and Maurice Pialat, has brought a European sensibility to depicting a Southern milieu. But whereas The Delta possessed a nihilism the director associates with Fassbinder, Forty Shades draws from Truffaut's The Soft Skin, which also informs his next project, Marriage, a '40s-set suspenser adapted from a novel by John le Carré mentor John Bingham (the inspiration behind le Carré's Smiley character). The Truffaut touch is especially evid ent in Korzun's performance, which Sachs likens to the controlled masochism of Catherine Deneuve. "If you'd look at Dina's script, there were, like, seventy-five notes for each page," he says. "Part of what she was doing was figuring out what to give and to hold back. Particularly towards the end of the film, she moves out of a naturalistic cinema style into something that's very Brechtian."

When Forty Shades collected the Grand Jury Prize (bestowed by a group that included Bay Guardian contributor B. Ruby Rich) at this year's Sundance fest, it was a moment that made Sachs's father – who lives in Park City – proud, even if the autobiographical film itself unflinchingly exposes the tension in their relationship. "I happened to be staying with my dad and his present 19-year-old girlfriend," Sachs says. "So that was really fascinating – it was a mirror-image kind of experience." (Johnny Ray Huston)

Hook, line, and sinker

Let me tell you a story about a fish. If filmmaker Hubert Sauper were a fabulist instead of a documentarian, that might be how Darwin's Nightmare would begin. Instead it opens with the ominous shadow of a jumbo cargo plane over the troubled waters of Tanzania's Lake Victoria, birthplace of the Nile. Music surges on the soundtrack, and we know we're in trouble. Sauper is tracking one particular k ind of trouble – a chain reaction set off nearly a half-century ago when a nonnative fish, known as the Nile perch, got dumped into Lake Victoria. A ravenous predator, it proceeded to eat everything in sight.

Omnivorous and cannibalistic, the Nile perch is destroying the ecosystem of the lake. Anyone who smells an allegory has a good nose: Nonnative Russian pilots fly giant planes loaded with Nile perch back to Europe as famine besets Tanzania. Villagers move to the lake to catch Nile perch to sell. Fishermen contract AIDS and die. Widows move to the lake to work as prostitutes. Homeless children roam the streets. Widows contract AIDS. Preachers fish for souls and bury bodies but won't advise using condoms. The human ecosystem is ravaged.

Darwin's Nightmare is a whodunnit, but it's also a passionate plea for the endangered soul of humanity. Pacing his chronicle with minimal intertitles that supply the facts, Sauper has enough heart to build his story on the ground, chock full of memorable characters and savvy local informants to narrate the tragedy. Raphael, the night watchman armed only with a poison dart gun, and Eliza, the prostitute who dreams of going to computer school, are not mere illustrations of a theory; they are memorable people whom we come to know and will never forget. What happens to the natives – their fellow Tanzanians who starve or sniff glue, who are orphaned or homeless o r buried in the continual funerals – or to those fish out of water, the Russians, really matters. They are pawns in a system of globalization in which we are all complicit.

A model for how documentaries should be made at this time in history, Darwin's Nightmare is much more than an antiglobalization manifesto. Sauper has composed a Homeric poem in celluloid. It surely will open your eyes faster than any new prescription, and change your vision of the world more thoroughly than any microscope or telescope on the market. Don't you dare miss it. (B. Ruby Rich)

'Darwin's Nightmare' opens Fri/14, Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa, SF. $6-$8.50. (415) 221-8184, www.balboamovies.com. It opens Mon/17, Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. $5.50-$9. (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. See Rep Clock and Movie Clock, in Film listings, for showtimes.