OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS (La Virgen de los sicarios)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Paramount Classics Director: Barbet Schroeder Writer: Fernando Vallejo Cast: German Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets Screened at: Broadway Screen Rm NY 8/15/01
After the shootout at Colorado's Colombine High School the cliche was bandied around once again: "In my day, disputes were settled by fists. Nowadays they use guns." You think that's bad? Contrast that with what they're saying about the high school kids not in Columbine but in Colombia: "They used to settle disputes with machetes. Now they use guns." This is an actual quote from Barbet Schroeder's new film, "Our Lady of the Assassins," the first Spanish-language work from the director familiar to Americans for movies like "Reversal of Fortune" and "Single White Female." In this bleak, cynical, blasphemous and occasionally even humorous vision of life in Medellin--known to us here as the capital of that country's drug cartel--Schroeder hones in on a well-traveled homosexual now in his fifties, Fernando (German Jaramillo), who has returned home, as he puts it, "to die." Why so? Despite the large apartment with a stunning three-sided view of the city and a considerable sum of money which he has inherited from his sister, he is simply tired of living. Ah, but redemption, spelled L-O-V-E awaits in the form of a innocent looking teen, Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), to whom Fernando is introduced at a party by a friend and with whom he establishes a sexual and caring bond.
Schroeder's take on the city of Medellin, based on Fernando Vallejo's novel, is not the sort that the Colombia Tourist Department would want to use to lure potential travelers to its doorstep. Schroeder filmed on the fly to avoid mighty unpleasant repercussions from the locals who dwell in the drug-infested barrios of the otherwise sparkling city. Its clean, well-stocked malls could pass muster in Southern Cal. and touristic areas of Europe. But "La Virgen de los sicarios" is a tour of a city, as Fernando advises a witness to a murder, in which "people get killed all the time....This isn't Switzerland." The lad whom Fernando has taken under his wing and who is in turn protected by young Alexis is sought by hit men. Bearing the kill- or-be-killed demeanor, Alexis has no problem whipping out his Baretta and offing a cab driver who refuses to turn down his radio. Ditto several people his own age who come bearing down on him on their Kawas, guns drawn. While Fernando does not much approve of his prot‚g‚'s behavior, he seems remarkably accepting, blaming the death of civilization for the murders that befall his homeland in much the way that Wallace Shawn's intellectual played by Mike Nichols in "Death of a Mourner" laments the demise of high culture.
If Fernando were living on New York's Sutton Place, we'd probably call him not so much a limousine liberal as an acolyte of radical chic. He has money, but he is a militant non-believer, an atheist who believes that if God exists, then He has failed and Satan has won the battle. He understands that the rich run the world, but like so many other radicals of the left, he has considerable contempt for the poor, telling one young, ragged woman with two children in tow to "beg for pesos from the person who knocked you up."
Amid the death and decay that Fernando and Alexis find in the city (in one area there is a sign "Do not dump corpses," where, of course, several bodies have been placed in states of advanced decay), there is considerable humor. In one scene Schroeder contrasts Fernando's love of Maria Callas with Alexis's fondness for rock, the latter insisting that the diva sounds as though she were being strangled. "Our Lady of the Assassins" is filled with the music of the people--the tango of the night club, the drums of the punk who lives in the apartment next door, the blaring beat of the taxi radios--but a Jerry Bruckheimer-type score would be gratuitous. Schroeder delivers his message loud and clear: civilization as the older generation knew it is dead, and Medellin is merely metaphor.
Rated R. Running time: 98 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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