From the original Edison shorts, through to Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, onto Italian Neo-realism and beyond, there has been a long-standing fascination with cinema's ability to represent reality. Naturally, special effects and highly-stylised cinematography have their place but the way in which cinema has been able to reveal and represent the finer details of everyday experience is something which has always enriched the artform.
La Vendedora de Rosas is an exponent of this quality. It films the barrios of Medellín, Colombia, in a manner which makes you feel as if you have experienced them directly. The film is, for the most part, completely non-judgemental, it merely gives us an extended glimpse of a reality which is likely very different to our own. It unflinchingly shows domestic violence, child-prostitution, street gang violence, juvenile delinquency, drug-taking and more. The camera is used as an open gaze: after each fight, verbal insult, or sexual advance made towards a minor, the film simply continues onto the next scene. The message clearly communicated is that what we are witnessing is simply normal life for the characters involved. They may be children but their lives are anything but innocent.
The film's value doesn't just lie in its verisimilitude, although it is worth noting that all of the actors were non-professionals and lived lives very similar to those represented in the film, it also strikes a chord because of how naturalistic and touching the central performances are, particularly Lady Tabares, who plays Mónica the eponymous rose seller. She is a young girl who left her family home seemingly due to not being able to come to terms with the death of her grandmother. Her grandmother appears to be the only person in her life who played a genuinely nurturing role and she is represented as a figure of angelic, redemptive quality in the short and subtle fantasy scenes which occur in the film and act as a departure from its generally more naturalistic style. The fact that Mónica feels that her life requires redemption tells us a great deal about her character: she is living the life that she feels forced to live, she has not chosen to enter a world of drug-taking and delinquency (who would?) she has fallen into it. Sadly, it seems very unlikely that she will be able to escape it.
The film does, unfortunately, verge on melodrama in the final act, which is a misjudgement in my view, but, for the most part, its unblinking representation of a world which offers constant threat and very little hope is one which is as eye-opening as it is stark. This is a film which, as much as any other, is able to capture the reality of the world that many inhabit. It's not just engaging cinema, it's a cultural and social education.
