Filmed in the murder capital of the world, Medellin, Colombia, "La Virgen de los sicarios" has plenty of material to appall many viewers. Showing man-boy love without portraying the man as a monster was sufficient to blind the critic of the ostensibly sophisticated New Yorker, for one.

The hair-triggers of the boys should frighten most everyone. The young killers' devotion to folk Catholicism will scandalize some, the protagonist's rejection of God may scandalize some others. There is no shortage of hair-triggered gangsters on film. And still others may find the alienated older writer a tiresome holdover from European art films of the 1960s. Nevertheless, I found the film riveting (not being impervious to the glamour of doom)..

I don't think it is giving away very much ("plot spoiling") to say that "La Virgen de los sicarios" does not end with "And they all lived happily ever after." Perhaps somewhat more surprising, is that Fernando Vallejo (the writer gave his own name to the character both in his novel and in the screenplay he adapted from it), who begins the film by announcing that he has come back to Medellin to die doesn't. Many men much younger than he is do.

Very early on he also announces that he has had sex with more than a thousand males. Finding love is not on his agenda. For that matter, even finding more sex isn't, but an old friend presents him a handsome, brooding youth named Alexis. They have sex, after which Fernando tries to pay him off, expecting nothing more, certainly not a committed relationship. However, Alexis clearly states that he is not interested in female partners (as many hustlers are or present themselves as being) and goes along to the nearly unfurnished apartment Fernando has inherited. In the following days, he accompanies Fernando on a melancholy tour of sites from Fernando's youth--at a time when Colombians went after each other with machetes instead of mini-Uzis. (In 1948 director Barbet Schroeder, who was seven years old at the time) witnessed a decapitation in the streets there.

Why does Alexis tag along with Fernando? He doesn't have anything better to do and is amused by Fernando's gallows humor and sarcasm about church and state -- though both of them visit churches often (Alexis making the same weekly pilgrimage, Fernando touring many he remembers from his childhood).

Fernando is one of a long line of writers fascinated by handsome amoral juvenile delinquents (William S. Burroughs, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Witold Gombrowicz seem particularly formative influences). Fernando and Alexis sleep together and presumably have sex, but on the screen they mostly walk around. Aside from any erotic thrall, Fernando is also fascinated by Alexis's devotion to María Auxiliadora (the particular Virgin Mary of the title) and in Alexis as a typical young Colombian ready to shoot anyone who annoys them. Alexis guns down eight or nine men. Some of them were trying to shoot him, but he also blows away three fagbaiters. That is, he embodies more than one kind of gay male fantasy! (And, writing to a beat obnoxiously pounding through the wall, I can fantasize deploying Alexis to bring quiet...)

Plot spoiler

In some ways Fernando is remarkable stupid. He fails to believe that Alexis must be armed and ready to shoot at all times. It is Fernando's fault that Alexis is unarmed when he is gunned down (and still protecting Fernando). After a period of grief (I think it is supposed to be a year), Fernando goes out and finds a somewhat darker and maturer replacement (replacement lover, replacement killer). Fernando makes Wilmar into Alexis, as James Stewart's Scotty replaced Madeline with Judy in "Vertigo" (except that both were played by the same person, Kim Novak). In both instances, the replacement is fully aware of being turned into a reincarnation and only occasionally restive about it.

The material goods Wilmar wants are nearly the same as what Alexis wanted. Fernando has plenty of money and buys Wilmar what he wants, just as he bought Alexis what he wanted. He made some attempt to refine Alexis's, but does not make any with Wilmar.

In both instances, concern for another (a wounded dog in the first instance, Wilmar's mother in the second) is fatal. It is sentimentality rather than nihilism or brutality that gets them killed.

Conclusion

"La Virgen de los sicarios" has a very, very dark view of life on the streets for the very numerous poor youth of Latin America--in the tradition of Luis Bruñuel's "Los Olivados," Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's"Amores Perros," Hector Babenco's "Pixote," and "Cidade de Deu," directed by Fernando Meirelles Kátia Lund and Besides casting the leading Colombian stage actor Germán Jaramillo as Fernando, Babenco cast two adolescents with movie-star good looks (and no previous acting experience) and Medellin street fatalism as his companions (Anderson Ballesteros as Alexis, Juan David Restrepo as Wilmar). Jaramillo tends to declaim, but this seems appropriate for a pompous upper-class writer feasting with panthers. The youths are totally convincing (chillingly convincing!).

Although I don't think the film is going to promote tourism to Medellin, the city (particularly from the apartment's balcony) looks beautiful, and the film is enhanced by Jorge Arriagada's score. (The first Schroeder film I saw, "The Valley Obscured by Clouds," was as much travelogue as romance -- with a well-known score by Pink Floyd. his other cheery films include "Idi Amin Dada," "Barfly," "Reversal of Fortune," and "Straight White Female.")

Watching a morose writer who has returned to die wander through the hell of Medellin after the death of Pablo Escobar set various masterless young Colombian samurai shooting down each other is not everyone's idea of a good movie, even if it is wonderfully photographed. And, alas, as one American president has declared a war (on terrorism) with the previous war (on drugs) an ongoing disaster, contemplating fatalistic young males with no hopes for a good life seems to me to remain important. Indeed, as a generation is growing up in the chaos of US-occupied Iraq, it is difficult not to imagine the folk Catholicism of Alexis and Wilmar having parallels with folk Islam in an Iraq for a generation growing up in crossfire.

I have to say that I find it difficult to decry 16-year-olds who are seasoned killers and have life expectancies calculable in months rather than years as children who must be protected from having sex with those legally certified as adults as "abuse." The love they grab on the way to the grave bothers me far less than the casual gun violence.

The Paramount DVD has no bonus features. The film was not made for the commercial appeal of its subject matter, but Schroeter is a major director whose serious work deserves better IMO. Shot (without authorizations) on high-definition video, there was no film digital transfer to do. The film has the vivid immediateness of "Cidade de Deus" and "Cidade de Homems."

Irritatingly, the English subtitles are burned in (cannot be turned off).


© 2001, 2007, Stephen O. Murray






Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD