Python Hyena
Our Lady of the Assassins (2000): Dir: Barbet Schroeder / Cast: German Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteroes, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets, Juan Carlos Alvarez: Misfire art film with a ridiculous title that indicates that both leads are gay. German Jaramillo stars as a writer who has lived in Europe for thirty years and returns to Columbia for his sister's funeral. Before long he befriends a young hoodlum and they have a pointless sexual fling then they travel the streets where every other person takes crack shots at them and ends up dead. This becomes predictable and repetitious but director Barbet Schroeder does his best. While his efforts should be applauded, he has had greater success with films such as Single White Female and Reversal of Fortune. Unfortunately here his efforts fail to achieve even the slightest sympathy towards this kid. Jaramillo delivers a compelling performance as an individual of cunning intelligence who is trying to figure out what his home land has become. Anderson Ballesteroes as the hoodlum is hardly interesting. He shoots everything that he comes into contact with including an injured dog. We know his fate and we do not care. Flat supporting roles featuring Juan David Restrepo and Manuel Busquets who can only hope that Jaramillo attracts viewers to this film. It is a film about youth and change but it gets reduced to violence and idiocy. Score: 4 ½ / 10
EdwardVI
Even trying with all his might the director couldn't make it worse. I know Colombia, and the violence was exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. How many people did the young guy kill for no big reason? like 10? For god's sake he even kills someone because his lover doesn't enjoy whistlers! In Colombia there are laws and police, and even if ineffective they would catch a killer so emotional and with that high a body count.The protagonist can't be more unlikable, it tries to sound like a philosopher, but ends up sounding like my frustrated literature teacher: complaining about everything but failing to produce good lines himself.Many Latin-American film makers try to capitalize on the stereotype that their country is violent and dangerous. This way, they comply with the foreign moviegoers' expectancies, and fool many critics who pass this implausibility as realism.Moreover, local moviegoers over-praise any movie that comes out of their homeland. I wouldn't be surprised if the current 7.0 score is due to 1000 colombians giving it a ten.
gut-6
I was initially reluctant to watch this film on account of the gay theme, thinking it would be yet another film about melodramatic queens celebrating their life and love against the prejudices of an incomprehending world. But the homosexuality in this film, like the rest of this film's worldview, is the tough, violent unsentimental homosexuality of Genet (as the title hints) or of William S. Burroughs's Interzone, where rent boys, misanthropy, anarchy and random violence are just part of the wallpaper. As such, this move succeeds in making a movie of "The Naked Lunch" much more so than Cronenberg's effort, even though it wasn't trying to do so.Fernando, the late middle-aged pederastic writer, returns from Europe to his home town of Medellin after a long absence "to die" as he puts it, because he professes to be sick of life. His family has already died, and he has inherited their money and residences, allowing him to live a comfortable life but with nothing to live for. At a boy brothel he meets Alexis, a teenage gangster from the slums, and they start living together. The love is genuine, giving both of them something to live for, even though it a sugar daddy relationship.The pederastic relationship is nevertheless a very small part of the movie. It is primarily a device to bring together these two characters who are polar opposites of each other. The opera-loving Fernando is aging and cynical, looking back to his youth surrounded by his family in a peaceful, semi-rural pre-narcotraffic Medellin. Accompanied by Alexis, he revisits his childhood haunts of the old Medellin, and comments bitterly on how they've changed or disappeared. Fernando believes in nothing, and wanders the streets of Medellin spouting his nihilistic, misanthropic but humorous cynicism towards religion, politics, Colombians, the French, breeders, hypocrisy, bad manners and just about everything else, to the delight of his uneducated and taciturn young companion. But Fernando is a man of words rather than action.The hardrock-loving psychopath Alexis by contrast says little, but lives out the nihilism that Fernando merely verbalises. Alexis's large family is alive in the slums, but he doesn't see much of them. Alexis has an itchy trigger finger, and shoots anyone who incurs their displeasure for increasingly petty reasons, with increasing disregard for any possible consequences, least of all from the absent and ineffectual police. Fernando is at first appalled at seeing this callous disregard for human life actually carried out, but drawn by his love for Alexis, comes to accept and assist and even motivate this casual violence as part of the way of life in Medellin. Fernando even berates a woman for shrieking over one of Alexis's murder victims. Despite this, Alexis is religious. He blesses bullets with holy water and keeps bringing Fernando along to Medellin's numerous churches. Yet Alexis is unable to shoot an injured dog, and Fernando does so only reluctantly.The churches have a central place in this film. Despite the chaos and anarchy of the slums, the churches are still magnificent, clean and orderly. You never see priests or nuns at the churches, but there are plenty of junkies, vagrants, whores and gangsters sincerely praying and seeking redemption among the pews or lighting candles, but also hustling for drugs. One of the most visually memorable sequences in the film involves a dream sequence where the camera does a long sweep through one of the churches. Likewise the city and the malls are also clean and orderly, and the public transport system runs. Somehow a relatively normal, indeed sophisticated and orderly, life goes on amid the carnage and the slums. This was for me the most affecting aspect of the movie.The movie is shot on video using rather naturalistic lighting, giving the whole movie a clinically clean but raw feel. Although music is played on many occasions over radios and ghetto blasters and by live musicians, there is minimal background soundtrack music. The acting is sometimes not very good, but it is always restrained and unflowery. All of these factors give the movie a pseudo-documentary look which makes it easier to believe the sometimes implausible elements such as the readily-accepted pederasty, the anarchic violence and the junkie-filled churches.Although there is a plot, most of the movie is devoted to mood and setting rather than plot advancement. Fernando and Alexis (and after Alexis, Wilmar) wander about Medellin with Fernando declaiming everything, cross someone's path and get into an argument, Alexis shoots the arguer, they go to church, they go to Fernando's apartment and talk some more. This happens several times without going anywhere. Despite this, the film is never dull and maintains a cracking pace. I was riveted throughout. I'm not sure what the message of the movie is if there was one, but it was certainly memorable.
