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By Dan Leone

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FATIH AKIN'S LIKABLE German feature In July throws a few curves into the road-movie romance that aren't exactly new but try their damnedest to look like it. Stereotypically button-down, glasses-wearing, socially semi-inept young physics teacher Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu, Run Lola Run's boyfriend in trouble) is targeted for heavy flirting by raver-type free spirit Juli (Christiane Paul). She succeeds in luring Daniel to a party but arrives late – just as he's exiting with Turkish beauty Melek (Idil Üner), with whom he spends an idyllic, if platonic, long night. Juli long forgotten, he takes Istanbul-bound Melek to the airport, ponders the strange workings of fate for a minute or two, then decides he'll use his current school vacation for a driving tour – to Istanbul and the love of his life, of course. Chance again intervenes, putting stung but still-smitten Juli in the passenger seat as a long-haul hitcher. They end up taking a circuitous route through Austria, Hungary, Romania, and so forth. In turn, Daniel is separated from his car, his companion, his sobriety, his wallet, and more. All this is told as a flashback within the frame of his own final hitching ride: with a very tense man (Mehmet Kurtulus) who, unbeknownst to Daniel, is harboring a corpse in the trunk. Vaguely redolent of early-'70s counterculture road flicks (Dealing, Thumb Tripping, etc.), if more superficially "alternative," In July sprinkles around glittery bits of magic realism that never quite lift the story from contrivance to fable. Nonetheless, it's almost always engaging, with a cheerfully not-quite-black sense of comedy that's underplayed to good effect – especially by Bleibtreu, who ballasts the film with his myriad degrees of bottled-up distress. (Dennis Harvey)