Following in their own footsteps and apparently staying true to their accustomed genres, styles, and leitmotifs, venerable directors Joel and Ethan Coen are about to place another film – and another black comedy – into their impressive body of work. Like their previous effort ‘Burn After Reading’, ‘A Serious Man’ is to be featured in the Toronto International Film Festival in September, albeit this time as a premier.

In many ways, from a 7 million dollar budget to a cast lacking cinematic superstars, this appears to be a smaller film than the Coen’s previous few, and probably for the better. Set in the late ’60s in a Minneapolis suburb, the plot follows Jewish professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) as his life begins to deteriorate: his maladroit brother (Richard Kind) won’t leave his house and his wife is about to leave him for a colleague. These and other misfortunes cause him to seek the help of three rabbis and try to ameliorate both his situation and his person.

The teaser trailer can be seen here:

The cleverly designed and paced trailer is intriguing, but it is as yet difficult to predict whether the film will see the same successes as ’08′s ‘No Country For Old Men’.

The multi-talented, cynical Coen brothers share credits as directors, writers, producers and editors for the film, the last under a different alias, Roderick Jaynes. Interestingly, “Jaynes” won an Academy Award for ’97′s ‘Fargo’, the only fictional creation to ever do so.

‘A Serious Man’ is set for its U.S. release on October 2, 2009.

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