October 19, 2001 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 13

evening'sout

Love in hell

Our Lady of the Assassins Directed by Barbet Schroeder

by Kaizuud Kotwal

Violence it seems, has become the lingua frança of the new millennium. Perhaps, it has always been our most forceful language as a human race. Gone are the days when the pen was mightier than the sword. Here are the days where a gun or a bomb can settle all arguments instantaneously, once and for all. Or can they?

Director Barbet Schroeder, who has given us such confrontational and strong films like Reversal of Fortune and Single White Female has made what may perhaps be his most compelling film yet. Schroeder returns to making a foreign language film in Our Lady of the Assassins after sixteen years, and he doesn't disappoint.

This is a brutal film about the fallout from the drug war in the mythical and manic city of Medellín, Colombia. Here in America, the fallacy of the drug war is some sort of abstract struggle against an invisible enemy. In Medellín there is nothing abstract or invisible about it. It is a real, palpable struggle, a war whose demons have ravaged the politics, the economy, the culture and the very fabric of Colombian civilization. It is a war that has nearly annihilated the soul of a nation and its people.

But, unlike last year's drug war epic, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, Schroeder's story is told from a microcosmic point of view. It is a deeply personal and enormously intimate struggle, as much a searing indictment of modern drug culture as Soderbergh's film is.

We are taken deep into the very private lives of Fernando and Alexis, a very odd couple, who get swept up in the madness of senseless violence and who try to find salvation in the sweetness of their love for each other.

Fernando is a respected, world-weary writer who has returned home to Medellín. This prodigal son comes home to find his country in shambles, a decaying metropolis, sprawling like some splattered, bloody road kill. Here in the new Medellín, the antithesis of what he left behind, fireworks mask the sound of gunfire and celebrate the successful entry of cocaine shipments into America. Here street signs warn against the dumping of corpses. In the modern Medellín coldblooded killings are more common than car crashes.

In essence this is a modern megapolis where there is crime and no punishment, where there are plenty of churches and little divinity, and where there are millions of living people not really living at all.

In this city where death is ubiquitous, Fernando, the jaded writer and cynical gay man, rediscovers his life by falling in love with Alexis.

Alexis is a street-smart kid who kills with

deadly precision and with cold-blooded detachment. The only parent, mentor and spiritual guide he has ever known is the way of the gun, and he makes no apologies for it.

It is a dog-eat-dog world and the best marksman and the one with the quickest reflexes survives. Alexis lives every day with the astute awareness that he is not so much living as postponing inevitable death, as long as he has bullets left in his gun.

When Fernando and Alexis meet, they are brought together by a simple, sexual transaction. Fernando likes young men, almost boys, and Alexis needs sustenance via money and material goods. However, what began as a cold, calculated exchange of groping embraces and bodily fluids soon metamorphosizes into a complex relation-

ship.

By all reasonable definitions, a love relationship between an older writer and a teenage gangster seems the stuff of lurid fantasy. Yet Schroeder's effective story-telling turns this into one of the most beautiful love affairs. The love between Fernando and Alexis, and later between Ferando and Wilmar, is handled with maturity and without squeamishness or judgment. Their love traverses the spectrum from lust and eroticism to neediness, nurturing, affection, tenderness and simplicity.

Both Fernando and Alexis have made Faustian bargains-Alexis with his gangster way of life and Fernando by falling in love with a gangster. While Alexis knows that he is living on borrowed time, Fernando at first also seems to have no desire to live any more. He tells Alexis that he has come home to Medellín to die because he has lived more than he has wanted to and that he is tired and through with living.

The irony of two men, both living with a death wish, who now find reason to live, is movingly captured by Schroeder and his

actors.

The film grows on you just like the love between Alexis and Fernando.

Schroeder, who was born in Teheran, Iran in 1941, was raised in Colombia. Seeing his country ravaged by the war on drugs, he found the perfect vehicle to express his hopes and fears through Fernando Vallejo's 1994 novel La Virgen de los Sicaros.

Schroeder's style here is part guerrilla filmmaking and part minimalist. The former helps lend an edge of danger.

The minimalism, stark and yet seductive, allows Schroeder to tell the story without judgment and it also works as a moving metaphor for the sterility with which murder and mayhem are so easily accepted and ignored in Medellín.

The actors here are marvelously up to the task. German Jaramillo, one of Colombia's pioneering and most well respected theatre practitioners, plays Fernando with a superb sense of the weight of the world slowly being lifted by the simple joys of being in love. As the character in the film who observes the

PARAMOUNT CLASSICS

Anderson Ballesteros, left, and German Jaramillo in Our Lady of the Assassins.

descent of Medellín into hell, Jaramillo lets us see his confusion and his deep pain in very simple ways a tiny grimace, a blank stare, a cool chuckle. Like Schroeder's film making, Jaramillo's acting is minimalistic as well and it is very effective.

Anderson Balesteros, a newcomer to film, plays Alexis with a natural quality and a sense of vérité that is beguiling and sophisticated. The chilling detachment with which he kills, contrasted with the doleful look in his eyes when he needs to be loved by Fernando, are beautifully portrayed by this young actor.

Balesteros also doesn't overplay anything for cheap emotions or for gratuitous sympathy.

The film's final story line brings together the disparate lives of Alexis and Fernando with even greater power. In this final segment enters Wilmar, another teenage gangster, played equally well by Juan David Restrepo. The film ends very openly as Fernando is left alone again in this city where he says God is dead and where Satan has

come to rule and do the justice that God failed to accomplish.

This film is an honest and harsh study about contemporary global politics looked at through a very personal and introspective lens. At one fundamental level this is a film about the nihilism of the modern age, saturated with drugs, violence and no values or virtues whatsoever.

Without ever preaching or getting overtly political, the film takes us into a stupendous examination about the ravages of post-colonialism, of the abysmal divides between the haves and the have-nots, and of the persistence and possibilities of love in times of moral, political and spiritual pestilence.

Given the recent violent events, this film is a prescient and powerful allegory not just about Medellín but about a global ethos that is on the verge of a very destructive nervous breakdown. ♡

Our Lady of the Assassins is currently playing at the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights, the Drexel East in Columbus and the Esquire Theatre in Cincinnati.

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