An interesting review.
September 2, 2001
'Our Lady of the Assassins': An Ode to
Medellín's Madness
By DAVID EDELSTEIN
hile directing the tumultuous
tragicomedy "Our Lady of the
Assassins" in Medellín, Colombia, Barbet
Schroeder learned from a crumpled note
hurled into a production car that he was in
danger of being gunned down by the same
sort of teenage hit squads whose exploits he
was busy restaging. Maybe they'd take him
for ransom; or maybe, if he didn't pay up,
they'd simply "waste" him, turning the
famous filmmaker into another casualty of
the cocaine-inspired carnage that had
ravaged the city for two decades.
It's not surprising, in light of that atmosphere,
that the movie is marked by a tension
between stylization and hurried detachment,
between Mr. Schroeder's meticulously
controlled color palette and his more urgent
inclination to keep from having his head
blown off. (To hell with retakes. That's a
wrap!) That tension makes for a peculiar
mix. The film, based on a novel by Fernando
Vallejo, revolves around a burned-out,
middle-aged writer named Fernando
(German Jaramillo), who returns to his
native Medellín "to die" but whose spirit is
awakened by adoration for a teenage
hitman, an "exterminating angel" called
Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros). An earnest
gay love story with equal dashes of nihilism
and self-pity, the film abounds in murders so
offhand that it's hard to know what to feel.
How are audiences weaned on conventional
morality plays to process such ambiguity?
Hearing the word "ambiguity" over lunch at a
high-priced Manhattan steakhouse, Mr.
Schroeder shuddered, mortified at the
prospect of having it turned against him by
Hollywood executives. Moral ambiguity
delighted audiences and critics in his
"Reversal of Fortune" (1990), in which Jeremy Irons's ghoulish Claus von
Bulow rises impishly above the vulgar question of complicity in his wife's
brain-death. But it resoundingly bombed in Mr. Schroeder's most cherished
project of the 90's, a sober adaptation of Rosellen Brown's novel "Before
and After" (1996) in which Liam Neeson plays a father laboring to cover up
a killing by his teenage son. His most financially successful film remains the
perverse but decidedly unambiguous slasher picture "Single White Female"
(1992).
"Our Lady of the Assassins," which opens Friday, is Mr. Schroeder's first
non-Hollywood project in more than a dozen years, and as discomfiting as
its filming proved to be, the director was entirely comfortable with its
"typically Colombian" riot of tones. "I love to see it with a few Colombians in
the audience," Mr. Schroeder said while attacking an immense, rare T-bone
that he had lavishly peppered and slathered with Dijon mustard. He speaks
in deep, French-accented tones with a gurgling, vaguely sinister laugh. "I can
spot their presence right away — the amount of laughs changes radically.
You would think you were watching a comedy." At the same time, he added,
there is no loss of sympathy for the protagonist's torment. "They laugh, yet
they understand that it's the story of someone who comes to die and meets a
pain that is bigger and more awful than the death he was looking for. And
through his pain they feel the pain of a whole country."
It is a country in which the tall, sharply chiseled Mr. Schroeder, who just
turned 60, spent some of his youth, yet always felt like an outsider. Born in
Iran, where his Swiss father worked as a geologist for an oil company, he
moved with his family to Bogotá at age 6 and lived there until decamping
with his mother to Paris four years later. A jet-setter of several fixed
addresses (his wife, the actress Bulle Ogier, lives in Paris), Mr. Schroeder
now considers his home to be wherever he's making a movie, and he was
actively searching for a Colombian project when he became enraptured by
the autobiographical novels of Mr. Vallejo — much as he had once become
enraptured by the stories of the skid row bard Charles Bukowski, who
wrote the screenplay for "Barfly" (1987), Mr. Schroeder's first Hollywood
feature.
Mr. Schroeder did not regard Mr. Vallejo's 1994 "La Virgen de los
Sicarios" (recently translated into English by Paul Hammond) as natural
screen material. A stream-of-consciousness monologue, it frequently swells
to an incantatory rant against Medellín, this "capital of hate, heart of Satan's
vast domain": "My fellow citizens suffer from congenital, chronic vileness,"
Mr. Vallejo's narrator rails. "This is an unscrupulous, envious, rancorous,
deceitful, treacherous, thieving race: human vermin in its lowest form. And
the way to have done with delinquent youth? Exterminate them in the cradle."
No, it didn't cry out to be filmed — especially since the young paramour
ends up shooting, by the narrator's estimation, some 250 people, including
pregnant mothers and children. "Some of those deaths are allegorical,
metaphorical, literary," Mr. Schroeder said, "and it was clear they wouldn't
translate to film. A murder in the movies has 10 times more weight than a few
lines in a book. You would lose all sense of reality."
Mr. Vallejo, who insisted that he could write affecting dialogue for the boys,
agreed to reduce the body count. Mr. Schroeder, meanwhile, had a visual
strategy for the killings — some executed in self-defense, some out of mere
pique. "I decided to show the violence the way I myself saw it in the streets
of Medellín," Mr. Schroeder said. "I would walk by and hear boom boom
and suddenly see people running and a person slumped in his car. If it was
filmed differently, like a violent American movie, I guarantee it would be
unbearable and impossible to digest."
Mr. Schroeder conceded the danger of making the audience think that he,
the filmmaker, is as emotionally distanced from the killing as the characters
on screen. "It's a very fine line," he said. "After the first murder, Fernando is
confronted with the worst dilemma. To have met this boy is the most
beautiful thing that has happened in his life. And now he is faced with the
choice of living with him and having other incidents like this happen or
forgetting him for the rest of his days. And, of course, he chooses love. I've
somehow got to have the audience go through what Fernando goes through
— and, in order to go through it, he has to desensitize himself. But believe
me: by the end of the movie the audience is not so desensitized."
Part of what makes that "desensitization" so tricky is the documentary-like
quality of the visuals. "Our Lady of the Assassins" teems with artificial colors,
slow-motion tricks and bold superimpositions, yet to many viewers and
critics it feels as if it's reality caught on the fly. The reason, Mr. Schroeder
said, is that it's the first feature shot on true high-definition video. (It was
released late last year in South America and Europe.) "There is so much
sharpness, so much detail, so much depth of field," he said, "that the city is
very present — a major character in the movie. You have a close-up of
Alexis and he's down in the city, but in the background you can see the poor
neighborhoods in the mountains where he comes from, where all those boy
assassins come from. You can see every little street, every car driving by,
every window of every house. For me, it's fantastic! Other directors like
close-ups in which the background is fuzzy, so that you concentrate on the
character itself. But I like to bring the background up. So for me this
high-definition was something I was waiting for all my life. And for certain
people it's like an extra dose of reality. In fact, it's some kind of hyperreality
— like Vallejo says in his book, it's 'reality gone mad.' You feel that all the
time in Colombia." |
