Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32854 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-03-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

From The New Yorker
A Colombian writer returns to his native Medellín to mourn his lost youth and, while he's at it, pick up a new one. That, more or less, is the tale that Barbet Schroeder's new movie has to tell. Schroeder has made some spicy pictures in his time, but this one feels lacklustre by comparison, and the two main performers-Anderson Ballesteros as the hustler and German Jaramillo as his aging mentor-tend to drift through their scenes, trying not to notice the hellfire around them. Whether they are genuinely ground down by the woes of the world or simply exhausted by years of casual sex is hard to work out; to be fair, few directors could make a film about moral anesthesia without sinking into glumness, and Schroeder does a pretty good job of insuring that no one in the audience will book a Colombian vacation in the near future. In Spanish. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

BARBET SCHROEDER, OPUS 13
***** 2000. Directed by Barbet Schroeder, this film is an adaptation of Fernando Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins. A disenchanted gay writer comes back to his hometown Medellin, Colombia. In the company of his new companion, a young killer, he will discover a city where crime reigns. Nothing has changed here in 30 years. Filmed in HDTV, OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS however isn't a documentary. The director uses this new cinematographic process in a remarkable manner in order to work on the colors. The film is a symphony of yellow, red and blue, the colors of the Colombian flag. As Barbet Schroeder grew up in Colombia from the ages of 7 to 11, he's also able to render perfectly the special mood of this awesome country. Masterpiece.

The worst movie I have ever seen
I was forced to give it a star but it does not deserve any. It is slow and boring, the only time you stop yawning is to turn into disgust. It is a waste of time and a shame for the good Colombian movie makers.

Impressive, unpleasant, but definitely worthwhile.
I am not sure how much of this film is autobiographical and how much is fiction. I do know that Fernando Vallejo, the novelist who wrote the novel "Our Lady of the Assassins" as well as this film's screenplay, is a reknowned Colombian author who, like the Fernando in this film, spent much of his life in voluntary exhile. (In the real Fernando's case, the exhile was in Mexico and Italy). In another series of novels Vallejo has written extensively about the difficulties of growing up gay in Colombia, so there is a possibility that in the novel and film versions of "Our Lady of the Assassins" we are getting glympses of his own life experience coming back to Medellin as a middle-aged man.

Both the film and the novel present a touching but in many ways distasteful romance between an affluent older man and an underaged hustler/hired killer from the Medellin underclass. Neither the film nor the novel pass judgment on the relationship, but both make the viewer/reader squirm. There is the obvious question of poor youth being exploited by an older man. Additionally, the older man is an unapologetic snob, a hedonistic social-darwinist whose contempt for the indigent around him reflects very poorly on the Colombian bourgeoisie. The younger man, beneath the angel face, is nihilistic and an apparently uncritical respository of crass international pop culture. The duo's comments about their lives and their meanderings through Medellin depict a very sick society--a portrait that is the thrust of Vallejo's novel.

Other commentors on this webpage suggest that they do not find the wanton violence in this film credible. Unfortunately, the press reports on life in Bogota and Medellin (particularly the latter, as one of the capitals of the cocaine cartels) bear out Vallejo's portrait. So, too, do the stories of many affluent Colombians who have emigrated to Miami in order to escape violence. And sadly, the literature and films about slum children from other large Latin American cities--Pixote (Sao Paulo), Los Olvidados (Mexico City), Amores Perros (Mexico City)--touch on similar themes [See the recent Colombian novel "Satan", by Moreno, which is a portrait of Bogota gone to hell]. This is an unpleasant, painful portrait--and we are seeing the portrait through the eyes of people who are alternatively sympathetic and horrible. But the portrait is probably realistic, as are our guides.

The deliberate use of unsophisticated cameras in this film add to the feeling of cinema verite and enhance the film's impact. All in all, this is an impressive undertaking, and the film goes beyond the novel in engendering dispair over the well-being of Colombia.