FREE: The Delta (2001)

The listing, The Delta (2001) has ended.

DVD in Like New condition in case.

Review by Peter Stack in the San Francisco Chronicle:

THE DELTA: Drama. Starring Shayne Gray, Thang Chan. Directed by Ira Sachs. (Not rated. 85 minutes.)
Nobody will walk away from "The Delta" without feeling troubled. This moody film, set in muggy Memphis, exudes a dangerous veracity that's both exciting and poisonous.

Writer-director Ira Sachs peels back layers that movies hardly ever visit. "The Delta" is steeped in a sense of privacy. Characters seem unguarded, like subjects in a hidden-camera documentary. They escape their world of bleary boredom in the lurid and the forbidden.

"The Delta" focuses on a well-off white 17-year-old boy whose surface straightness is a mask for a restless infatuation with men in a world of gay cruising and peep-show sex. After the easygoing Lincoln Bloom (Shayne Gray) meets a poor Vietnamese immigrant, Minh (Thang Chan), son of a black GI, at an all-night movie house, they take a playful, spur-of-the-moment trip down the Mississippi in Lincoln's father's cabin cruiser. But the adventure of sunny discovery and romance only traps them in a cruel revelation of how mismatched they are. Different classes, different ethnicities, different in their rage at the world. Their impossible love, with playful moments such as a swim at an isolated riverbank mud hole, is a poignantly twisted take on "Huckleberry Finn." Ultimately, the impossibility of their lives has tragic consequences.