At The Movies

Just One More Person Dying

Our Lady of the Assassins (***)

Sasha Stone
Mirror film critic

   “I Cannot Go On. I’ll Go On.”
                                                   - Samuel Beckett
   Despair and hopelessness color the world that Barbet Schroeder delivers in his quietly affecting “Our Lady of the Assassins.”
   Based on an autobiographical novel by Fernando Vallejo, “Our Lady of the Assassins” tells the story of Fernando (Germán Jaramillo), who has made the decision to end his life in Medellín, Columbia, the sacred place of his childhood memories. Everything has changed — the church is a crack house, teenage boys carry guns, poverty is the very air they breathe.
   The tale unfolds as Fernando hooks up with a male hustler named Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros). What could have become a regular trick turns into a relationship as Alexis and Fernando leave the brothel and head for a local church. Fernando rattles off one line after another about the meaningless of life. He is, after all, a writer — someone who looks at the tragedy and sees a blooming metaphor. His companion has a different set of eyes; having been trained to always look over his shoulder, whip out his gun and blow away an enemy without giving it a second thought. Their budding relationship would seem like any other except that Alexis is terribly young and Fernando is too disillusioned to read the writing on the walls.
   Events take a different turn when Alexis casually offs a noisy neighbor who is bothering Fernando. This casual murder means less to Alexis than the stereo system Fernando tosses off the balcony one day because he can’t stand the noise. Alexis values the stereo, his clothes, his weapons — Fernando, in ordinary circumstances, would value life. But in his hopeless state he values only the time he spends with the doomed Alexis.
   There are many elements at work in Schroeder’s film, which appears to be his most personal in decades. Filmed on digital video, it has an immediacy that makes the reality so much closer. When Alexis whips out his gun and randomly shoots people, it happens in the present, without romance or drama. Sometime after each killing a woman cries, and each time, she is ridiculed by the two men. In one case, she is, most pointedly, a pregnant woman — what Fernando would hatefully call a “breeder.” As far as he’s concerned, if people would only stop breeding the problem of poverty would go away.
   Fernando slowly discovers that his Medellín no longer exists. God has failed the people who most believe in Him. Satan rules the day. Fernando becomes a part of the cycle and ultimately has no choice but to turn his back on that world, on any world.
   “Our Lady of the Assassins” is at times horribly moving and at times lifeless. Where it falters is in the last third, when all of the disturbing threads are meant to braid together. It is rather like a film on lithium — it never goes too low, but it never goes too high either — it skates gracefully along, presenting a casually depressing look at a world most of us don’t know and couldn’t imagine if we tried.
   Where the film succeeds is in its surprisingly real images — moments that seem to be born from the present rather than created on a page. It has the feel of a documentary, and you never think that you’re watching actors.
   One of the most unforgettable moments in the film comes when a young boy buys a box of pastries and is immediately ambushed by street people who kneel before him, as if they were receiving communion, as he carefully places one on each tongue.
   Barbet Schroeder did what so many directors long to do but most are not brave enough to do. He made a film he wanted to make. It is artistic expression at its most honest. He didn’t want any stars so he trolled the streets of Columbia to find “actors.” This isn’t a film that’s going to change the world, and it probably won’t make a lot of money. What it might do is crack open a door that’s been too tightly closed for too long. We exist in a dream world, to some extent, and we don’t want to see what is becoming of humanity in places we can too easily forget about.