In 1990s New York, a restless subject drifts about an apartment, one corner to another. She lies down, glamor on pause, and asks Ira Sachs what he is looking for, filming her with that camera. “Just yourself,” the novice director answers. She shows him herself—multiple selves that clash as much as constellate, obscure as much as disclose—and sets the tone for a filmography in which identity is candid, mutable, wayward. That Sachs had an affinity with the messy humanists and combustible melodramas of European cinema—Jean Eustache, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Maurice Pialat—was evident right from the start.

After a capricious character study in that short film, Lady (1993), Sachs’s first feature rippled with similar fluidity and ambiguity. Back in his hometown of Memphis, he made a groundbreaking intervention into New Queer Cinema with The Delta (1996). Casting issues of race and class into the sticky morass of sexuality, this singular coming-of-age film immerses itself in cruising’s fickle waters, where the narrative focus becomes gradually unmoored. Delicately filmed on 16mm stock, the grain of the image is bathed in evocative blues: the electric cobalt of police sirens and the soft periwinkle of boxer shorts combine in a promiscuous palette, expressive of both danger and tender touch.

That color becomes exquisite melancholy in Forty Shades of Blue (2006). Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, this shattering romance is, like Lady and The Delta, about an interloper in white middle-class America and shimmers with an astonishing lead performance. Whether an isolated woman of ethereal detachment or a charismatic lover with mercurial desires, these characters open up under Sachs’s direction. What’s the secret? He asks everything and nothing of them. He asks only that they be themselves.