RECOMMENDED
“I may be a cowboy but I have good taste.” An impressionist fantasia of moments in the lives of figures behind the scenes of a rodeo in northeastern Brazil, documentary-trained director Gabriel Mascaro’s “Neon Bull” (Boi neon) offers a succession of voluptuary visuals in its sketched-in scenes and dabs of poetic fancy, with humans, with animals and with humans who dance wearing a mask of a horse’s head. The fancies include a straight cowboy who dreams of designing women’s clothes; a heist of stallion sperm; and sexual candor that climaxes in a tender, sustained scene of riveting rutting. Plus: gender turns and gently implied class consciousness. With Juliano Cazarre, Maeve Jinkings, Vinicius de Oliveira. 97m. (Ray Pride)
“Neon Bull” opens Friday, July 1 at Siskel.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
