Usama Alshaibi of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Carlos Jiménez Flores of the Chicago Latino Film Festival discuss depictions of race and ethnicity in popular media.
For Love in the Caserio Adapted from a play by Antonio Morales, this 2013 drama transplants Romeo and Juliet to a Puerto Rican ghetto, with the handsome young lovers (Anoushka Medina and Xavier Antonio Morales) divided by feuding drug crews. Director Luis Enrique Rodriguez shot the movie in the shabby Llorens neighborhood near Ocean Park, recruiting some players from the area, and the montage sequences offer some vibrant local color. The whole thing goes down pretty easily, though the occasional nods to Shakespeare (“You’re so cheesy!” the girl exclaims in the balcony scene, as the boy riffs on Romeo’s “Juliet is the sun” soliloquy) are effectively neutralized by all the melodramatic cliches (the girl and her mother slap each other in the face and then stare at each other openmouthed). —J.R. Jones 107 min. Fri 4/4, 6:30 PM, and Sun 4/6, 3:30 PM.
Son of Cain This Spanish genre item (2013) recalls such postwar Hollywood thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool, grounding its pulpy story in serious discussions of psychoanalysis. A noted child psychiatrist is engaged by a wealthy couple to treat their 14-year-old son, an intellectual prodigy who’s begun exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. Director Jesus Monallaó fares better with the psychological material; the analytic sessions, in which the doctor tries to determine whether the kid is a typical adolescent acting out or a genuine monster in the making, are nicely paced, and the two leads play well off each other. Yet Monallaó lacks the panache to pull off the suspense set pieces, which end up seeming both implausible and insufficiently flamboyant. —Ben Sachs 87 min. Sun 4/13, 6:15 PM, and Tue 4/15, 9:15 PM.
Thu 4/3-Thu 4/17River East 21 (322 E. Illinois) and other venues $12chicagolatinofilmfestival.org
