Our
Lady
of the Assassins
by
Chris Dashiell
Reading in the newspaper about the violence and suffering
in many parts of the world is like trying to summon the unimaginable.
Descriptions become as hard to grasp as statistics. In the end it falls
to the artist, as a need and a grievous obligation, to try to make these
places, these lives, imaginable.
Our
Lady of the Assassins has been adapted by the Colombian writer
Fernando Vallejo from his own novel, a darkly satiric indictment of
Colombian society and the endemic violence that has resulted from the
drug war. The tale is set in Medellin, the center of the drug trade,
where a gay author named Fernando (Germán Jaramillo) has returned
from self-imposed exile, bitter and resigned to a meaningless life.
He encounters a handsome teenager named Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros),
and takes him as a lover. It turns out that Alexis carries a gun, is
on the run from unnamed assassins, and is in the habit of killing people
without a second thought.
Fernando's
philosophical despair, a kind of aesthetic fatalism, is contrasted with
Alexis' deeply callous attitude towards death, the product of horrendous
living conditions and experiences. The boy is sweet and emotional with
Fernando, to the point of feeling protective of the older man. This
leads to unfortunate results - he kills an insulting cabdriver and a
neighbor who keeps Fernando awake by playing drums, among other crimes.
The writer is horrified, but begins to adopt the same feelings of indifference
as his young lover.
Barbet Schroeder, a German director who spent time in
Colombia as a child, has wasted recent years on a series of run-of-the-mill
Hollywood projects. Here he has trouble converting the novel's literary
technique into cinema. The film is too talky, with the Fernando character's
morose, poetic musings becoming positively annoying at times. For much
of the film it is hard to see him as anything but a shallow, pretentious
exploiter thinking only of his own pleasure.
Nevertheless,
the movie eventually evolves into something stirring. It's probably
Schroeder's best film since Reversal of Fortune. This is mainly
due to his deft handling of the young actors, especially Ballesteros
and Juan David Restrepo (as another boy killer), who bring the world
of the Medellin streets alive with an alarming mixture of tenderness
and brutality. The picture was shot with high definition video in Medellin
itself, and these teenage actors, who live in the city's poorest district,
are playing close to their real life roles.
The film makes connections between the death-obsessed
imagery and dogma of Catholicism, and the culture of murder. The couple
wander the streets, often ending up in church, praying to the Virgin.
The kid assassins make sure that their bullets are blessed before firing
them. In one of Schroeder's best touches, Fernando dreams of the hidden
catacombs of a cathedral that turns out to be a morgue for the city's
lost children.
Despite
the film's unwieldy literary tone, it succeeds in evoking a relationship
in which there is no tomorrow, with convincing intensity of feeling.
The movie is hard to watch - traveling from the hopelessness of emotional
distance to a place of such degradation that there really is no hope.
The ending image, a curtain closing, speaks of finality - but in truth
the tragedy is not over. And that, ultimately, is the point.
***
The independent film holds the hopes of the discerning
critic, weary of mainstream bombast, in its hands. I generally prefer
the sincere work in miniature to the top-heavy, star-studded gasbag
playing on a million screens. But beware! Lousy films exist in all shapes
and sizes.
For
instance, I recently paid money to see a film called Haiku Tunnel,
written and directed by Josh and Jacob Kornbluth. This low-budget indie
purports to be a comedy about life as a temporary office worker. Josh
Kornbluth plays a bumbling loser named Josh who is hired as a temp by
"S & M Associates." When his boss assigns the task of transcribing and
mailing seventeen important letters, Josh procrastinates and ends up
having to go to painful lengths to cover his ass and keep his job.
Kornbluth's
idea of comedy is to open his eyes very wide and emphasize each word
in his tepid repertory of office jokes as if it were the height of hilarity.
Some of the gags, I admit, are amusing (such as the provision in his
office's health insurance that provides for his psychotherapy), but
delivery is a vital element in humor, and Konrbluth has the delivery
of the guy who sat next to you in junior high making noises with his
armpit.
Haiku Tunnel is like a feature-length SCTV sketch,
or maybe a live-action 
version of "Dilbert" - except much worse. I tried to summon some admiration
for the energy and enterprise that it must have taken for the Kornbluth
brothers to create this work, but instead I found myself mourning the
loss of seven dollars from my wallet.
A sure bet for the Turkey Issue.....
©2001 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
