The Brothers Bloom (2009) - by Faro

Every good film is a con, bringing us into a world that doesn’t exist and making it real. So when a movie comes right out and says its about confidence schemes it needs to be extra sharp so that it can still succeed in conning the now alerted and wary audience. 

This movie begins with that necessary confidence and skill. We are shown the young brothers, as foster-home children, embarking upon their first con. And we, as the audience, believe we understand their simple scam against the other children of the town, who are tricked in their Sunday white clothes to pay two dollars each to learn the location of a magical/dirty cave to have an adventure in. But of course, this simple scam collapses the minute the children go home and tell their parents. The parents come by and demand the money back from these delinquents, and send them on to a new town and new foster parents. 

And then, and only then, are we shown the true nature of their con, for just as they seem to have failed it is revealed that their plan was never to cheat the children at all but was rather to scam and escape the boring little bourgeois town they felt trapped in. So, behind the scenes, they had quietly negotiated a percentage deal with the only dry cleaning business in town for all the dirty white clothes that would came in later that day. And then having burned bridges they relish the chance to move on to a new town, a new foster family, and new possibilities to invent and deceive. That is what a con film is all about... you think you know the con, but at the same time they are pouring water all over the cave to make it muddy and you can’t imagine why until they tell you.

But the rest of this film is not a clever confidence scheme... quite the opposite actually. The cons are unconvincing and unsurprising to watch, and the brothers are wrapped up in a unnecessarily complex relationship with each other that is more misguided literary theory than actual pathos. The narrative itself is knocked off course by two underdeveloped secondary characters; the Belgian who starts off-promising but ends up in a closet, and the unsettling backstory character named Diamond Dog who serves no real purpose and whose nickname seems to have come from the title of a David Bowie album. And amidst all this crazy scheming the only person who really seems to be consistently having fun is Rinko Kikuchi (who is absolutely stellar, and has single-handedly reshaped and updated the silent comedy of Harpo Marx). 

So, in an effort to honor the good that does exist in this film, here are some pictures of Rinko Kikuchi: