The Brother’s Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Tamara Mamukelashvili. Viewed at the ArcLight theater, AFI Film Festival.

The Brothers Bloom is magnificent film that involves comedy, love story and crime. Two brothers who are the con men, mostly moving around in Europe with the girl called Bang-Bang, who doesn’t speak at all throughout the film but has a lot of action and face expressions that director emphasizes in the film and the idea of it is to highlight the farce of the film.

Later on they involve an innocent character Penelope (who is reach but very lonely) into their game and audience discovers Penelope’s character and the relationship with other characters in the group.

The film is entertaining, easy going and very funny but besides that it has a meaning and strong storyline that makes audience to discover all kind of emotions throughout the film.

The way director decided to discover the characters and the relationship between them was very enjoyable and amusing. As the film begins audience gets an idea of the characters but as it continues the characters develop more and we find out other, completely different things about each of them.

Director uses two types of comedy: The visual elements (e.g Bang-Bang’s character) and the use of language. These elements also clearly shows the relationship between the brothers which in some scenes is very funny and entertaining but in some other scenes pretty sad, this is one of the reasons why this film was very powerful and emotional.