Screening tonight as the opening night film at NewFest, New York’s LGBT film festival, is Four, director Joshua Sanchez’s debut feature film. The drama is about two distinctly different couples—one illicit, the other fresh—both secretive and struggling with their personal demons and conflicted desires on a steamy July 4th night in suburban Connecticut.
Four stars Wendell Pierce, best known as Det. Bunk Morleand from HBO’s The Wire, in a controversial role most people never expected to see him in, playing Joe, a middle-aged, married man out on an Internet date with a white teenage boy named June (Emory Cohen, Afterschool, 2008). It’s their first date and Joe is determined not only to show the shy and reluctant June a good time, but through pointed advice and example to get him t0 be more aware and confident in himself and his sexuality. This despite the fact that Joe, himself, is a closeted homosexual. Their own night takes a few twists and turns, though in a low-key and organic way dissimilar from the way most films unwind.
Ignorant of her father’s double life is Joe’s teenage daughter Abigayle, played intensely by Aja Naomi King (Damsels in Distress, 2011), who at the beginning of the film is on the phone with the pot-smoking Dexter, making potential plans to hang out that night despite lying to Joe that she will stay home to take care of her mother (played hauntingly by Yolonda Ross, I’m Not There., 2007), who is confined to her bedroom for reasons that are revealed much later in the film. Abigayle eventually hooks up with Dexter, a sexy and confident Latino who seems to have blown his chance to become a basketball star. Played by E.J. Bonilla (Musical Chairs, 2011), it appears Dexter has his own secrets, though none as intense as the moody Abigayle’s own, which Dexter works humorously to break down.
Sex, race, class, and gender are dealt with in a complex yet genuine manner throughout the movie. In both stories the characters get what they originally wanted out of the night, but the stories are far over from there, as both couples are forced to confront their personal demons under starkly different circumstances.
Four is less about sex and more about being disconnected from the world and dealing with your own identity, seen primarily in the teenagers—June for his sexuality; and Abigayle for her guilt over being a young and privileged, yet still unhappy black girl. “The feeling of having nowhere to turn to but your city, but to strangers,” says Sanchez, “this feeling of utter isolation and overwhelming longing for something ‘more’ is what led me to make Four,” which he adapted from the original play written by Christopher Shinn. Sanchez, a Columbia University film school graduate, grew up in Texas as a gay teenager and understands those conflicts first-hand.
Even with the thought-provoking and low-key style that Sanchez employed to make Four, there’s no mistaking that the film stands firmly on Wendell Pierce’s broad shoulders. He anchors the film with a maturity and sensitivity that audiences aren’t used to seeing from him. Pierce’s Joe is the most controversial character in the film, as he steps out on his family to become sexually involved with a teenage boy, who happens to be white. And from his dealing with June, it’s obvious that this is not Joe’s first homosexual encounter, and most likely not his first with a teenager. One can too easily predict that many in the African-American community will be uncomfortable with Pierce’s depiction, but as he remarked in a recent interview on Indiewire blog Shadow and Act, “I thought I was the last person you would think to play this role, at least this is something that I’ve never been asked to do … For me, the conclusions people will draw from this film will be influenced by the dearth of diversity in portrayals that we have. I expect people to say, ‘Why did Wendell participate in the emasculating of a black man?’ The real question is, why do you feel as though that’s emasculating? A man can’t have a conflict? When you try to do art, it’s how it lands on people, and hopefully some people will see it the way that I saw it, which is all of these awful choices come from the place of a man who’s damaged.”
Limité Rating: 3/4
Director: Joshua Sanchez
Cast: Wendell Pierce, Emory Cohen, E.J. Bonilla, Yolonda Ross, Aja Naomi King
Site: fourthemovie.com
Release Date: July 27 (NewFest Opening Night film)
