Our Lady of the Assassins

Our Lady Of Assassins showed at the Brisbane International Film Festival. It left me initially distraught and other members of the audience obviously felt the same. After a bit of thought, I realised that it was indeed a powerful and beautifully created way of presenting the desperate nature of life in Medellin. The main character, who was born and raised in the town, remembers how potentially violent it was even 40 years earlier, yet seems to be shocked by how much it has decayed. It is strange that he is also quite complicit in inciting violence, while seeming to be just looking for love.

The film forces the audience to question the day to day value of life and just how much violence we can allow ourselves to tolerate. But in Medellin the solution is certainly not in the hands of just one person.

A great trio of films showing the broad story of the cocaine phenomena would be "Our Lady Of Assassins", Ted Demme's "Blow" and "Traffic".

Occasionally venturing into dreamlike surrealism, the movie mostly hits you with a heavy dose of cinema verite. The movie is about the city of Medellin in the same way that Midnight Cowboy is about New York. The characters aren't dealing with the problem of staying human in a huge metropolis, but staying human in the midst of instability that verges on anarchy.

The effects of fifty years of civil war aggravated by narcotrafficking and the associated crime are shown in two ways, which are the central themes of the film: the shift from the old and traditional to the modern, and the loss of value that human life has suffered. The banality of the several killings in the movie drives home the second, and the explorations that Fernando and his two boyfriends (sequential, not simultaneous) take through the city show the first.

The movie is violent like the Godfather is violent: the killings are not gratuitous, they are there to make a point. As a document of life in an industrial Andean city which just happens to be the second city of the country poised to become the next Vietnam, or better said, the next El Salvador, La virgen de los sicarios is excellent. It is sophisticated in its writing and its photography. The characters are human and complex. It ought to be in far wider release than just one screen in the whole L.A. area - which happens to be on the West Side, where Spanish-speaking people typically don't live.

Hi, I was reading about the comments of the movie "La virgen de los sicarios"... some people think that there is bad acting in this movie, and i am disagree absolutely... I live in Cali, Colombia and i can assure you that what you see in the film is exactly what you can see in the real live in some poor parts of the colombian cities... i am talking about everything: the way people talk, the way they move, all is very real... if you live in this country, you can understand that the actors in the movie are not acting... they are living!!! because that what you see in the movie is what we are in Colombia. Thanks for your attention.

Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins is a perplexing film. Yet, it is ultimately rewarding in ways that most films aren't.

Shot in high definition digital video, the film has an immediacy to it that cannot be simulated by film. At first, the immediacy seems to cheapen the look and one wonders what Schroeder was thinking when he decided to undertake this format. Yet as the complexity of the story progresses, we seem to be "taken in" by the video's hypnotic effect and we realize that we are viewing a medium with its own look, feel and characteristics and we accept it.

About an older man who befriends and enters into a relationship with a young ex-gang member, the story takes a while to unfold. In the beginning it seems all but pointless, yet within the hour, we are caught up in a film of overwhelming depth and emotional power. Schroeder deserves tremendous credit for having the courage to make a movie in which the main character openly denounces the church and where themes of political corruption and anarchy in a real world setting actually exist.

Most disturbing is that the themes in this movie ring true with an authenticity that cannot be challenged. We are simultaneously horrified yet held captive by a reality which we don't want to believe exists but that we know already does, not only in Colombia, where the film is set, but elsewhere as well. Schroeder is a master here of making the "city" of Medellin just as much a character as the protagonists. He charges the environment with an electricity that seems to pervade the screen and crawl into our psyches.

Unfortunately it is the medium itself which may prevent Our Lady of the Assassins from becoming a commercial success or as being taken seriously by a lot of people. But film purists and those who enjoyed the gritty realism of similar films like Pixote and Santa Sangre, should love this one.

Our Lady of The Assassins will have you either loving it or hating it. It polarizes because it never compels as a movie itself, but is laid out before each person, needing him or her to internalize the film. The movie speaks of living in a Columbian drug town and the irony as people get shot everyday by moral-less teens set against the beautiful city and sky. But the main character, an old gay writer, is never engaging or as articulate and thoughtful as one would expect from the "best known grammarian" from Columbia. In fact, as grammar is rigidly structured, so are the writer's banal comments about 'time being what you want it to be' and 'life only being lived to die.' The musings have been heard before, but with greater clarity and depth. There is no epiphany to be associated with any of his sayings. However, he meets a young former gang member, marked for death, named Alexis and they fall in love. The film is so detached that their love is the closest element to emotion, and still one cannot understand why this boy would sleep with a man who incessantly whines constantly. The shocking life in Medellin is the most compelling aspect of the movie and the movie still has points, it's just that they are not nearly poignant enough. They are shown by the director, but never cohesively placed into an argument. I really wished I could have liked this movie.