Our Lady of the Assassins

• Director: Barbet Schroeder
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: Drama
• Movie Type: Gay & Lesbian Films, Urban Drama
• Themes: Age Disparity Romance, Inner City Blues
• Main Cast: Anderson Ballesteros, German Jaramillo
• Release Year: 2000
• Country: CO/FR
• Run Time: 101 minutes
• MPAA Rating: R

Plot

A middle-aged man wanting to revisit the city of his birth discovers time and corruption have taken a terrible toll in this drama. Fernando (German Jaramillo) is a successful gay writer who was born in Medellín, Colombia, but has lived in Europe for the past 30 years. Feeling jaded and uninspired, Fernando decides to return to Colombia after the death of his sister, who was the last surviving member of his immediate family. Fernando remembers the Medellín of his youth as a beautiful place, but now the city is the capital of the international drug trade, and crime and urban sprawl have made it a harsh and dangerous place to live. At a party, Fernando meets Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), a member of a teenage street gang. The two soon strike up a friendship, as Fernando tries to show Alexis what's left of the city he once knew, and Alexis teaches Fernando the grim realities of life and death on the streets. Fernando and Alexis become lovers, but despite their affection for each other, Fernando does not fully understand the dangerous and volatile nature of life in the new Medellín, which leads him into grave danger. La Virgen de los Sicarios was written for the screen by Fernando Vallejo, based on his novel. Director Barbet Schroeder shot the film on location in Medellín, using a digital video camera in order to speed up production in the notoriously dangerous city. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Review

This audacious meditation on death, violence, godlessness, and the breakdown of social order in the face of guerilla capitalism has the good grace to lace its incredibly heavy themes with wit, comedy, intellectual passion, and smoldering sensuality. After a string of lackluster Hollywood films, director Barbet Schroeder returns to form with this layered, visually arresting Spanish-language feature in which the voice of reason and moral accountability is an atheistic, middle-aged writer with a taste for wiry, beautiful young boys and a chasm of regret a mile wide running through his soul. Colombian stage actor German Jaramillo brings an air of tragic aestheticism and knowing contradiction to the difficult role of expatriate writer Fernando Vallejo; his transformation from self-pitying observer to thoughtful, yet active participant in his homeland's struggles parallels the audience's journey from titillation to emotional investment and, ultimately, spiritual devastation. The irony and ambiguity of La Virgen de los Sicarios, however, permeates far more than just its indelible central character. This is a film that forces us to indulge in our taste for humorous, cartoon violence, then chokes the laughs before they've left our throats. It also forces us to examine our complicity in the enjoyment of cheap beauty, turning its romantic themes into a meditation on the intersection of sex and money. Anderson Ballesteros and Juan David Restrepo, playing parts very close to their actual lives on the streets of Medellín, bring a primal mixture of beauty, affection, and savagery to their roles as Vallejo's young hustler friends; the apparent ease with which their characters navigate a world of casual drive-bys and constant death suggests that the term "amorality" loses its meaning when one is raised in a world where human life has no value. The film's true star, however, is Medellín itself -- a city whose shocking beauty, sickening squalor, and frequent sacrilege are captured in crisp digital video and accented by Schroeder's hallucinatory dream sequences. Like Before Night Falls -- another film whose gay themes are secondary to its political and humanistic concerns -- La Virgen de los Sicarios uses the figure of an outsider artist to map out the darkest corners of our global society in all its beauty and tragic desolation. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Cast

German Jaramillo - Fernando; Anderson Ballesteros - Alexis

Credit

Jaime Osorio Gomez - Co-producer, Jorge Valencia - First Assistant Director, Herve Ruet - First Assistant Director, Barbet Schroeder - Director, Elsa Vasquez - Editor, Jorge Arriagada - Composer (Music Score), Flor Marina Sandoval - Makeup, Rodrigo Lalinde - Cinematographer, Margaret Menegoz - Producer, Barbet Schroeder - Producer, Miguel Angel Guzman - Special Effects, Dominique Hennequin - Sound/Sound Designer, Jean Goudier - Sound Editor, Fernando Vallejo - Screenwriter, Monica Marulanda - Costume/Wardrobe, Monica Marulanda - Set Decorator, Fernando Vallejo - Book Author

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Death in Venice; Pixote; Salaam Bombay!; La Femme Nikita; Happy Together; Men With Guns; Amores Perros; Before Night Falls; City of God; Warrior of Light; Maria Full of Grace; Días de Santiago

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