OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS []
Love and death in Medellin. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (violence, sexuality, frontal male nudity, drugs). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.
——
BARBET Schroeder, the director of “Single White Female” and “Reversal of Fortune,” returns to his Colombian roots with this Spanish-language film about a middle-age exile who comes home to find a debased society wracked by murderous violence.
Based on the novel “La Virgen de los Sicarios” by Colombian author Fernando Vallejo, who now lives in Mexico, it takes you into the heart of Medellin, a beautiful city where life has become astonishingly cheap, and where the cocaine cartels send up fireworks every time they get a coke shipment into the United States.
But you get there by an unusual route. The film starts at a party given by a wealthy gay Medellino, where the protagonist, Fernando, is introduced to Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), one of several teenage hustlers at the event.
Alexis is not just a street kid, he is a pistol-packing young assassin who kills without feeling. Nevertheless, after Fernando and Alex have sex that first night, Fernando installs him in his empty high-rise apartment and buys him clothes and music.
During the days, they wander through the streets and into churches (Alexis, like his fellow teen assassins, is surprisingly religious) and get into arguments with rude cab drivers, one of whom Alexis promptly kills.
Indeed, whenever Alexis feels that he or Fernando is being insulted, he immediately reaches for his Beretta automatic.
Soon, the relationship between the civilized, literate older man and his gun-toting catamite, though initially a matter of flesh exchanged for cash, deepens into something like love. But, of course, Alexis’ days are numbered.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to care much about world-weary Fernando, with his portentous talk about coming home to die, or the inconsiderate Alexis.
Flat dialogue and stiff performances (especially by the street kids, like Ballesteros, turned into actors by Schroeder) don’t help.
In the end, the most intriguing things about “Our Lady” are the way it conveys (on high-definition video, shot at considerable risk to the filmmakers) the physical loveliness of desperate Medellin, and its remarkable, refreshingly matter-of-fact presentation of homosexual relationships of a kind rarely if ever depicted in American cinema.