Last year when I wrote a review for the Brazilian masterpiece Sócrates, SadClown and I discussed the nuances of “queer tragedy” in cinema. We agreed that tragedy is every bit a fertile and important ground for exploration in queer cinema but far too often it’s presented as mawkish and anodyne (at best) or downright insulting or homophobic (at worst). My personal rule with queer tragedies is as follows:
1. Is it a tragedy where the queer characters could be swapped with cishet characters without losing its overall impact? Think Mulholland Drive or Ellie’s storyline in The Last of Us 2.
2. If the character(s)’ orientation or identity is indeed a part of the tragedy, are the character(s) given agency and an ability to fight back? Think Sócrates or Urbania.
Our Lady of the Assassins falls into the former category but takes a more peculiar and expansive look at how gay love and identity exist in an environment where casual, random, but frequently *non-homophobic* murder is a commonplace occurrence.
Our Lady of the Assassins follows Fernando (Germán Jaramillo) a middle-aged author who has returned to Medellín to die. He’s wealthy by the city’s standards, openly gay but discreet, and content to passively enjoy his days before death comes for him (whether by his own hand or external circumstances seems beside the point). He’s less a mopey sad-sack and more a meditative nihilist, one who isn’t above having some fun. At a party hosted by some of his fellow gay male friends, he’s presented with Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), a handsome 15-year-old sicario, and the two immediately begin their affair.
From the start, the film thrusts the viewer into queasy and uncertain territory. The idea of a middle-aged man having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy is, to put it diplomatically, thorny material to explore. Queer viewers in 2023, especially given all the ongoing “groomer” homophobic discourse, would be forgiven for finding the film to be too repulsive in this aspect to be enjoyed. But the film is not a GLAAD nightmare writ-large nor a lurid bad-taste thriller (something I’m certainly not opposed to under the right circumstances). The film, directed by Barbet Schroeder (Best Director nominee for the courtroom classic Reversal of Fortune and the director of the gloriously sleazy thriller Single White Female), and adapted by Fernando Vallejo from his semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, takes a more inquisitive look at Fernando and Alexis’ relationship.
The film, set when Medellín was “the murder capital of the world”, asks what morals would really apply in a situation like this, especially since Alexis is a remorseless killer who can shoot someone who irritates him as easily as if he were swatting a fly. The “odd couple” energy of this pair lends to some very darkly funny scenes, such as when Fernando complains that guns have made the bloodshed “too easy” and how “back in his day” people used to settle scores with knifes and machetes. But all and all, Our Lady of the Assassins studiously resists the urge to exploit the pulpiness of its central premise and is all the more intriguing and powerful as a result.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Ultimately, Fernando and Alexis’ relationship comes to a grisly end as Alexis is gunned down in a drive-by. The grief-stricken Fernando visits Alexis’ mother in the hillside slums and on his way back becomes enamored with Wilmar (Juan David Restrepo), another young boy who looks strikingly like Alexis. Much like Alexis, Wilmar is also a gay young sicario (how many sicarios in Medellín are gay teens is unfortunately a question the film doesn’t answer). Fernando, seemingly acting on a cross of lust and continued apathy toward life itself, pursues a relationship with Wilmar, who is harboring his own dark secret. To share more would be to spoil too much, but as Roger Ebert noted in his original review of the film: “what goes around comes around.” If Wilmar’s storyline feels truncated compared to Alexis’s, that’s partially by design; in a city like Medellín at the turn of the millennium, happy endings are few and far between. The final shot of Fernando alone on a bridge is about as bleak as one would expect; a sobering reminder of all the lives lost to pointless violence.
In lesser hands, a film like this could collapse into high camp hilarity (“ludicrously tragic” comes to mind), but Schroeder and Vallejo know how to keep the film grounded. During filming, Schroeder opted for the vérité approach, often using gangs as security, and limiting the scenes to as few takes as possible for safety purposes. The digital camera cinematography gives the film a pleasantly grubby feel (save for a couple of fantastical scenes toward the end, which are much more lush). The cast is uniformly convincing and if no-one character has a truly noteworthy performance, the easy chemistry only adds to the lived-in atmosphere.
Revisiting the film so many years after its release, its bleak worldview is tempered by knowledge of how much life in Medellín, and Colombia in general, has changed. Violent crime and armed conflict still tragically persist, but the overall murder rate has decreased significantly over the past 20 years. Colombia is credited with having some of the best healthcare in the world and is now South America’s third largest economic power. As for LGBTQAI+ rights, Colombia ranks among the best in the Americas, with anti-discrimination protections becoming law in 2011 and equal marriage becoming legalized in 2016.
Colombia has come a long way in the years since Our Lady of the Assassins was released. The film is a painful portrait of a time when life in Medellín really was seen as so grim a certain “fuck it, how much further can we fall?” attitude persisted in all social relationships and moral choices feel increasingly irrelevant. By focusing on the lives of a gay man and two gay boys, the film is a broader, more sorrowful look of a nation’s pain.
It is far from a comforting or “positive” queer film, but it’s exactly the film Fernando, Alexis, and Wilmar deserve.
Trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1634731801/?ref_=tt_vi_t_1