O Brother, Where Art Thou?

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * *)

The opening credits announce the relationship of the latest Coen brothers outing to Homer's Odyssey and even invoke the Homeric muse to help the filmmakers to sing of "the man skilled in all the ways of contending."

But no classical education is necessary to enjoy a fast and loose story of lovable rogues on the run, a picaresque adventure set in the American South of the 1930s.

The allusions are thick on the ground: the lead character, Everett Ulysses McGill, is heading home to reclaim a wife called Penny (Hunter); he runs into a one-eyed thug (Goodman); is perilously serenaded by three gorgeous temptresses; and crosses paths with political rivals called Menelaus and Homer.

But, like the sly in-joke of the title (it was the name of the film-within-a-film in Preston Sturges' 1941 satire of Hollywood solemnity, Sullivan's Travels), these references remain incidental diversions in the Coens' most affectionate and genuinely enjoyable film since Raising Arizona.

When McGill escapes from a Mississippi chain gang, he literally drags his chainmates (Turturro and Nelson) with him. They team up with a young black man who has sold his soul to the Devil in return for guitar-playing mastery (as, by legend, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson did).

The quartet's interstate adventures include close shaves with a demonic sheriff and the Ku Klux Klan, and are leavened by accidental stardom when they happen into a rural radio station and make a hit record which will eventually determine their fate.

It sounds improbable and it rattles on the rails towards the end without completely coming off, but we are dragged along for the ride by the deliciously unpredictable storyline and the charm of the performances - particularly Clooney's self-mocking matinee idol turn which has more than a whiff of Clark Gable about it ("Damn," he says three times, straight-faced in one scene, "We're in a tight spot!").

In any case, we're not meant to take it seriously. This South, lensed by Roger Deakins as a nostalgically autumnal landscape of burnished beige, never really existed; even a Klan rally might have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley, though it still manages moments of genuine menace.

It is the Coens' Valentine to a lost era of Americana, a fact underlined by the rich soundtrack overseen by T. Bone Burnett. The Coens are northerners (they grew up in the landscape of Fargo) but this film is a virtual encyclopaedia of southern style - blues, gospel and bluegrass - often featuring original performers but also demonstrating (when the convicts, as the Soggy Bottom Boys, perform Man of Constant Sorrow) that lip-synching can work perfectly.

See it once. Then go back and watch it with your eyes closed.

Cast: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Charles Durning, Holly Hunter

Director: Joel Coen

Rating: M (low level violence)

Running Time: 117 minutes

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas