The Delta: Across the Lines

Even within Lincoln’s predominantly white community, Sachs is careful to expose stark differences in social strata. As Lincoln and his pals embark on one long night of hanging out, they pick up a female friend from a house considerably more modest than Lincoln’s, and the teenage girl’s expletive-laden front-yard quarrel with her mother, who accuses her daughter of stealing cash from her purse, harshly and uncomfortably underlines the divergent ways in which families discuss—or, in Lincoln’s case, likely don’t discuss—the specter of money. As the night wears on, the kids aimlessly smoke pot, chilling in outdoor garages or indoor rec rooms, enacting obscure fragments of fights and flirtations. Lincoln forcefully tries to kiss Monica, the pertly perfect blond girl he’s dating, and becomes offended when she resists, calling her a “bitch.” Then Lincoln retreats into his shadow self, returning to the cruising spot we saw at the film’s opening. But this time, he tests his own boundaries by allowing himself to get picked up by a white, middle-aged businessman, who brings him to a local hotel room. Lincoln’s moonlighting only goes so far; after he is commanded to strip during the older man’s awkward attempt at dom-sub role-play (“You like being Daddy’s boy?”), a turned-off Lincoln gathers his things and leaves. In a film about the tentative breaching of divides, this line—the boundary that would typically separate a rich kid from the hardscrabble life of a rent boy—is one that even teenage sexual curiosity can’t bring him to cross.

After this moment of self-subordination, Lincoln retreats to a more familiar enactment of desire and goes furtively cruising in a local arcade. Here he reencounters Minh and again becomes the object of another man’s lustful glance. At this point, Thang Chan overtakes the movie. Magnetic and aggressive in his pursuit of Lincoln, Minh is forthright, unapologetic: he calls Lincoln “cute” and “sexy,” comes right out and asks if he is gay, and constantly refers to him with the diminutive “boy,” a word that has both sexual and racial connotations as a term of implied inferiority—though coming from Minh it sounds as much like a term of endearment as a power move. Minh—who goes by John—seduces Lincoln, at least emotionally. Just hours after Lincoln had somewhat needily asked his girlfriend if she loved him, Minh is now the one asking Lincoln, “Do you want to love me?” Lincoln’s curiosity is piqued, his youthful ego likely stroked. When the two decide to abscond with a boat to go downriver on the Mississippi, it’s still unclear who is using or exploiting whom.

These knotty—and irresolvable—issues are not the normal province of gay coming-of-age stories, which often build to some kind of confrontation or redemptive conclusion. Here, Sachs provides no easy comfort; instead of fashioning a common cause-and-effect arc, he allows the film to ebb and flow around the inchoate feeling of experiencing the world as an outsider. A portrait of queer interiority, The Delta explores how such emotions are compounded by parallel oppressions. The film’s sense of authenticity—or at least humane curiosity—is likely thanks to Sachs’s approach to the material. After writing a string of initial drafts, the director had reconstituted the script after meeting and getting to know Thang Chan. Sachs later said, “I rewrote the film with him in mind, using a lot of his own history. So the character couldn’t have existed without the actor . . . He was an immigrant. He grew up in Saigon with a GI for a father.”

In preparing for The Delta, Sachs spent nearly half a year back in Memphis, familiarizing himself with the city’s Vietnamese community. After writing an early version of the screenplay, he conducted a series of videotaped, improvisational exercises with his nonprofessional actors, the results of which would inspire new drafts. It’s difficult to imagine The Delta without this step in the process, which evidently allowed Sachs to see the world from a perspective different from his own; when making a film about the wide gap between the privileged few and those who are never given the opportunity to rise, the author’s ability to put himself in a position of discomfort—an act of self-implication—is crucial. Among The Delta’s most discomfiting ideas is that queerness can create only a momentary bond between people from different sides of stark socioeconomic and racial divides.

In the film’s controversial final passage, Sachs overturns everything we may have come to expect. Following Lincoln and Minh’s fleeting connection on the river, Lincoln goes home and tries to rekindle a romantic relationship with Monica, once again seeking the comforts of the closet and suburban privilege, at least for now. Minh—beaten and abandoned by a desperate, scared Lincoln after the two nearly get arrested for playing with illegal fireworks—returns to his own life as well, though by contrast it is one marked by economic deprivation and stasis. In the last scene, Minh tells a sweet-natured African American man who picks him up at a bar that he “plays games with people.” He claims, with a hollow forlornness, that he is a liar by nature, and that, though he can flatter and whisper sweet nothings, he never thinks of his hookups again.

Are we to believe that everything Minh told Lincoln was a lie, a ploy to get closer to him, to try and transcend the socioeconomic and racial boundaries that keep him impoverished and feeling unloved? Or is he lying now, as a way of creating distance between himself and his failed relationship with the white boy he seemed to have true affection for? Did we—like Lincoln—only hear what we wanted to hear? We will never know; the shocking act of violence that closes the film doesn’t provide an answer, just further fogs the lens. For his part, Sachs has said he always felt The Delta “was too German! I had watched just a hair too much [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.” One can sense, in the final scenes, the grim influence of that great queer auteur’s work (particularly his darkest, most unsparing films, such as In a Year of 13 Moons or Fox and His Friends), but these fatalistic moments carry the weight of a specifically American tragedy.

However one feels about the swift, sad ending, it’s undeniable that it represents a kind of challenge largely unseen in gay-themed films, which continue to revolve around images and stories of positivity and pride. In a Village Voice article about the state of queer cinema in 2002, B. Ruby Rich, who just a decade earlier had coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” wrote: “The prevalent Queer Lite formula endlessly recycles romantic comedy, pausing every now and then for tragedy, then getting back on the dance floor. Issues of race, class, family trauma, and life-changing desire are not likely to pop up on the current menu.” Rich then identified The Delta as one of the rare exceptions, calling it a “groundbreaking work.”

Throughout his career, Sachs has proved his commitment to questions of contemporary queer living. In such films as Keep the Lights On (2012), a startling portrait of an on-again, off-again relationship severely strained by drug addiction, and Love Is Strange (2014), about an aging long-term couple separated by cruel economic realities, Sachs dramatizes deeply personal stories in which gay men are never arbiters of social assimilation, and always exist outside the forward march of hetero time. Like these films, The Delta reminds viewers of those untraversable regions that make queer sexuality both a privilege and a burden in a world that has traditionally made no physical or emotional space for it.