|
|
OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS
|
For fifteen years, science fiction writers have been imagining a cyberpunk future where technology meets street argot -- never quite believing it could occur, happy to write these neo-nihilist futures and in so doing exorcise them. Now, with OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, we are presented with a documentary-with-a-plot that shows us a city, Medellin, Colombia, where literally the inmates are running the asylum. A world awash in money and poverty, where squalor and death are cheek by jowl with extravagant wealth. There is a medieval quality to the social class gaps, eloi behind tinted bulletproof glass, morlocks in Reeboks, death around every corner. It is a hideous atrocity that such corruption exists, floating on a cushion of narcobucks -- see what misery your drug dollars have spawned.
Aging gay esthete Fernando (German Jaramillo) returns home to Medellin -- "to die," he claims, but actually to befriend passive vacant youths to be his daytime and night-time companions, like young Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), who in disrobing reveals both his pistol and the rib scars from a shotgun blast. Fernando, away for thirty years, knows nothing of the modern Medellin. Alexis knows nothing else. So he acts as Fernando's tour guide and bodyguard through the Lord of the Flies tribes of urban punk youth, shooting and starving and fucking and wearing baseball caps and logo clothing. "Write down everything you wish for in life," Fernando suggests to one, and reads the napkin-printed list: a boombox, some CD's, three designer tee-shirts, and a Whirlpool refrigerator for my mother.
Maintaining an air of melancholy aristocratic reserve, Fernando knows he is slumming. He seems almost to enjoy that his rambling erudite monologs sail over the blank faces of his companions -- until, in one breathtaking moment, Alexis whips out his pistol and shoots dead a pair of motorcycle assassins sent after him by a rival gang.
Alexis kills instantly, instinctively, incuriously, tuned like a radar-guided missile. In the instant of perceiving a threat, he dispatches it -- then shrugs and returns to normal, as if a shootout is nothing more than a strong sneeze -- urgent, of course, loud and faintly vulgar, but something you wipe on a hanky and put back in your pocket. (Both Alexis and the other youths are not actors but real street kids, and thus they are more credible and affecting than any actor could be.)
Fernando is horrified -- and fascinated by his own horror, energized by it, in love with it. More motorcycle assassins go for Alexis. He shoots a passer-by who gets angry (and is revealed, in death, to have himself been a drive-by bandit murderer). In this Fernando finds a spiritual meaning as he leads Alexis into one after another lurid Spanish Catholic churches with their bleeding flagellated Christs and kewpie-doll Virgins.
Fireworks spontaneously shot off at night announce another cocaine shipment has made it into the United States. A trash-filled ravine has a crudely hand-lettered sign, NO CORPSE-DUMPING ALLOWED -- with hog-tied corpses in torn plastic bags at the bottom. So agape are we at this mad world -- 15 deaths a day, twice that rate on weekends, 95% of crimes unpunished -- that we overlook motivational chasms: the incredibility of Fernando's return, his incessant didactic faux-profound ruminations (he's a writer, so he has a license to bore), the movie's absence of thread. Love and death are grotesquely intertwined in the story, just as church and blood are juxtaposed in Latino Catholicism.
If you stay with the perambulations, about seventy minutes in, the movie delivers two brutal, breathtaking surprises for Fernando (and for us), one after the other, when the trite clichés Fernando has spouted come viciously back to him -- and we and Fernando must rethink everything we have experienced.
OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS never escapes the ghetto, never shows us a drug, never introduces us to a drug addict or pusher or zealot. It is seen through its twisted creatures, as if the whole movie were a Hieronymous Bosch bestiary hell made by the unseen devil of money and cocaine. This movie is what TRAFFIC pretended to be.
P S Sorry about our recent trend of brutal urban downers, but this summer has been bereft of quality entertainments.