Our Lady of Assassins

Barbet Schroeder was raised in Colombia so he is well-qualified for this, a story of a gay Colombian writer, who after living most of his life abroad, comes home after thirty years to his birth city of Medellin to die.

Based on an autobiographical story by Fernando Vallejo, who after living most of his life abroad, comes home after thirty years to the city of  Medellin to die, the film follows the familiar idea of a protagonist returning to a past that no longer exists, the story being a vehicle for reflections on life and the depredations of time. 

Schroeder has had a varied career including Hollywood hits like Reversal of Fortune (1990) but here he abandons high production values and returns to his independent roots in the French New Wave (he assisted both Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer with film projects in the early 1960's) shooting the film on high definition video equipment with non-professional actors (German Jaramillo, a stage actor and founder of the Free Theatre in Bogotá, who plays Vallejo, is the only trained actor. Anderson Ballesteros, who plays his toy-boy, Alexis, was 16 and wanted for kidnapping and armed assault at the time of filming).

Evidently a project Schroeder cared about, and one that he could only have made using these kinds of guerrilla strategies, unfortunately he does not get it to work. The film looks like the kind of late night low budget TV serials and, more importantly, never manages to develop its own identity, one feeling that it is merely illustrative of its original text (Vallejo wrote the screenplay and was apparently heavily involved in the production).

Colombia is the cocaine and murder capital of the world with armed gangs constantly warring (Medellin is known as Medallo or Metrallo, after the word metralleta or machine gun) but this is not an action film and it lacks both atmosphere and dramatic dynamic and with a central character, a dyspeptic fin-de-siècle flaneur who dislikes everything but hanging out with his punk boyfriend who takes great pleasure in shooting people for the slightest provocation, the viewer can intellectually appreciate the story but not engage with it emotionally

 

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