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 history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” in words and images will be published in Spring 2022.
Previews of that project on Twitter (twitter.com/chighostsigns) as well as photography on Instagram: instagram.com/raypride.
Twitter: twitter.com/RayPride
