OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS (La Virgen de los sicarios)
Worldly gay writer Fernando (German Jaramillo) returns home to family inheritance, but no family, in Medellin, Columbia. At a male gathering in the elegant home of an old friend, Fernando meets teenager Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), the sole survivor of a gang that got wiped out on the city's streets. While Fernando opens his heart and pours out his bitter philosophies to the young man, Alexis opens Fernando's eyes to the unremitting violence that's taken over the places of his youth in the Columbian submission for Best Foreign Language film, "Our Lady of the Assassins."
Adapted from his 1994 novel by Fernando Vallejo and directed by Barbet Schroeder ("Reversal of Fortune"), "Our Lady of the Assassins" is a film of contradictions, at once poetic and tender while also brutally violent, where a machismo culture is shown matter-of-factly through the eyes of homosexual characters and gang members pay homage to the Virgin Mary before gunning people down in the streets.
Fernando rails against God as he visits old cathedrals overrun with the homeless and drug abusers. He's irritated by the music blaring from every taxi he enters and the nighttime drumming of a young neighbor across the courtyard even as he indulges heavy-metal punk loving Alexis in a stereo system (which he later hurls off his balcony). He relishes the irony of finding bodies on a hillside posted with the sign 'No dumping of corpses.'
Fernando is shocked one morning as he crosses the street and witnesses a man killed, literally at his feet, for refusing to turn over his car keys, an act Alexis dismisses as stupid. He's a little less shocked when Alexis identifies his drumming neighbor on the street and shoots him dead, decrying the senselessness of the act while attending to the practical matter of not getting caught. Soon he's so inured to the environment that he joins Alexis in making fun of the hysteria of a pregnant woman who witnesses a gang murder, yet he continues to fret about food vendors and restaurateurs who split paper napkins to save money ('a fly couldn't blow its nose in this!').
As Alexis begins to get visits from the aptly named Deadboy, tipping him off as to the nature of that day's assassins, Fernando seems to alternately accept the surreal aspect of their existence and become suicidal. In saving Fernando from himself, Alexis loses his precious revolver, and Fernando, perhaps now believing Alexis is invincible, naively professes good riddance.
While Fernando's stance on violence never seems to be as strongly rooted as he initially professes it to be, stage actor Jaramillo makes us feel his nostalgic ache for more innocent times and the pain that would make he himself pull the trigger. Non-actor Ballesteros is astoundingly good as the handsome young Alexis, whose relationship with the older man reveals the human side of a boy forced by his environment to deny one. Juan David Restrepo has less opportunity to prove his acting skills as Wilmar, the second boy Fernando loves, as his character is largely symbolic, but he does make one important line a climatic, jolting revelation.
Schroeder, who was raised in Bogota, filmed his movie guerilla-style. Warned by police that he was a strong candidate for kidnapping, Schroeder moved quickly, using high definition video to move through the streets as unobtrusively as possible. He captures both the beauty of a classical old city of plazas and cathedrals and the squalor of poverty and violence brought by the corrupt influence of powerful drug cartels. His evocation of the religious fervor that still endures is most powerfully wrought in a Bunuelian scene of a street kid sharing sweet buns with beggars as if he were dispensing communion wafers at an altar.
"Our Lady of the Assassins" takes us on a poetic, nightmarish journey into a spiralling cycle of violence and death that is all the life too many people know.
B+
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