I
RENE
J
AVORS
r
eleASed last fall and now avail-
able in home video formats,
Four
is
a gripping and insightful explo-
ration of the lives of four characters who
are grappling with their fears and desires
around connecting intimately with another
person. Adapted from the play
Dying City
,
by Christopher Shinn,
Four
is a film about
loneliness and the lengths to which people
will go to form relationships, regardless of
the risks and obstacles. with this film,
Joshua Sanchez makes his debut as a
screenwriter and director of a feature-
length movie.
Set in “everytown, USA,” on a sultry
July Fourth, we encounter Joe (wendell
Pierce), a middle-aged, married, African-
American professor who has arranged an
assignation via the internet with June
(emory Cohen), a teenage white boy who’s
struggling with his sexuality. At the same
time, Joe’s daughter Abigayle (Aja Naomi
King) is conflicted about her attraction to
a former basketball star named dexter (
e. J. Bonilla), who is poor, uneducated,
and from a different cultural and racial
background. in addition, there’s the spec-
tral presence of Joe’s wife and Abigayle’s
mother, who appears ever so briefly but
packs a wallop when she does. Sick and
confined to her bed, she’s the focal point
of Joe’s guilt and closeted sexuality as
well as Abigail’s grief.
what follows is an interview with
Joshua Sanchez. A native of Houston and
a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA
film program, in 2003 he won the HBo
Young Producer’s development Award. He
lives in Brooklyn.
Irene Javors:
What led you to make the
film,
Four
?
Joshua Sanchez:
I saw a different play by
Christopher Shinn called
where do we
live?
at the Vineyard Theatre in New york
in 2005. At the time, I was finishing film
school and had made a few short narrative
films that were playing at various film fes-
tivals, and I was looking to start working
on a feature film project. I was asked by
PS122 Gallery’s web magazine
Artwurl
to
interview someone, and, based on what I’d
seen in
where do we live?
, I thought
Chris would be a great subject. I read
Four
while researching for that interview, and it
instantly felt right to me. It reminded me
of growing up in the suburbs as a closeted
gay kid: I could see the environment and
movement of the story so visually. Chris
and I hit it off right away. He’s around my
age and had a similar upbringing. Another
filmmaker had the rights to make
Four
at
the time, but that hadn’t panned out. When
I found out that the rights were available, I
jumped at it.
IJ:
you mentioned that you could relate to
Shinn’s play because it connected with
your own life experience. Can you elabo-
rate on this?
JS:
I moved to New york City from
Texas, where I’m from, in 1999. I was a
very shy young person and didn’t come
out until I was 23, around 2000, after
moving to New york. I come from a very
conservative, Christian, Mexican-Ameri-
can background. I grew up in the Southern
Baptist church, so it was really shocking
to my family when I came out. My mother
basically disowned me and my father died
right before I began working on
Four—
in
a car accident—but was very much on a
downward spiral for the last part of his life
because of severe alcoholism.
By 2005, I’d finished graduate school
and I was in the middle of my first serious
relationship. I’d also begun to do psycho-
analysis in a serious way, which was a big
part of my life at that time. It was an inter-
esting and exciting time, but incredibly
turbulent. In looking back on that period, I
felt incredibly ill at ease. I was almost
thirty and hadn’t really done much to
show for my own progression. I also felt
Joshua Sanchez: on Making the Movie
Four
ARTIST’S PROFILE
64
The Gay & lesbian review
/
worldwide
derstand the conventional, working-class background of her
parents, while Emma, an art student set on a career as a painter,
issues from a more sophisticated milieu. Emma’s mother and
stepfather are frankly welcoming of Adèle, this new girlfriend
who hopes to be a teacher of young children. Meanwhile,
Adèle’s less worldly parents, meeting Emma for the first time,
are led to believe that the girl with blue hair is just another friend
of their daughter.
The camera adores the natural beauty of the girls’ lithe, nu-
bile bodies. The intensity of the lovemaking scenes, like the un-
forced conversations between the pair, achieves a kind of
cinematic verisimilitude that’s rare on film. Their dialogue
sounds spontaneous and their sexual intimacies appear unre-
hearsed. We might assume that director Kechiche, a straight
man, enjoyed just a bit too much the prerogatives of the male
gaze. But the script is also an inquiry into the subtle power dif-
ferences between two women of disparate temperaments: Adèle,
socially awkward and less assured; and Emma, brazen and pro-
fessionally focused. This makes the erotic scenes seem a neces-
sary examination of how these imbalances are redressed.
Of course, in drama there must be conflict, and (spoiler
alert) the course of this love story does not run smoothly. For all
Emma’s romantic assertions about being an artist uncompro-
mised by commercial considerations, it turns out she’s a quite
eager careerist. And while Adèle may seem tentative and awk-
ward in the company of Emma’s crowd, as a teacher of small
children she demonstrates warmth and authority, tenderness and
command. But Emma has been Adèle’s erotic mentor and takes
the lead role in determining the social shape of their relation-
ship. Faced with such an assured mistress, Adèle seeks the oc-
casional company of her teaching colleagues—and this leads to
trouble.
Remarkable as it may seem for a nearly three-hour film,
Blue is the warmest Color
remains a spellbinding, almost doc-
umentary account of one young woman’s coming of age: her
first fuck, first true love, first job, first great heartache. Both
actresses give complex portrayals of young women in love,
first lost in their private dream, then riven by temperamental
differences that are bridged and then broken. When the Palme
d’Or was awarded at Cannes in spring 2013, it didn’t just go
to Kechiche as director but also to his two female stars.
Kechiche has done something improbable: a male director has
given us an account of lesbian love that is both sexy and sober-
ing, and given space to two young actresses, lovely and natu-
ral in their physical beauty, to really give portrayals beneath
the skin.
