The way they laugh in Gianni Amelio’s follow-up to the outstanding 1994 film Lamerica is either very quietly or off screen, for humor, other than ill humor, is at a minimum in this relentlessly gloomy period melodrama. Giovanni (Enrico Lo Verso), fresh from Sicily, disembarks at the Torino train station looking for his teenage brother Pietro (Francesco Giuffrida). He must be at school, Giovanni assumes when his sibling is a no-show, but in fact Pietro is evading his older, illiterate brother, just one of many fraternal secrets alluded to but never quite revealed in this family history spanning six years. Amelio keeps secrets too: he divides his film into six days spread over six years, with each episode bearing a portentous title —"Deceptions," "Money," "Blood" — and beginning in medias res and never quite clarifying what those res are. What does become clear is the inhumanity of the city (filmed, however, as if it were a smoky, gilt dream by Luca Bigazzi); the way the depth and ambivalence of the fraternal bond leads to self-sacrifice or Cain-and-Abel-like violence; and the numinous beauty of Giuffrida and Lo Verso, whose faces look to have fallen from a Renaissance fresco. Not much to laugh at (the title in fact refers to a 1950s Italian joke column), but when Amelio is on target, aspiring to the sublime. In Italian with English subtitles.