Reviews

"I want to represent the beauty of my state" says it all, resonating throughout this drama as a kind of tag-line to the showcasing of that inexorable power of drug-money to reach into all areas of life.

The story of Laura Guerrero - a name as ironic as the claim to represent northern Mexico's 'beauty' - is the story of the impossibility of combating the drug traffic, either legally, politically or even on moral-aesthetic grounds. Unsuspecting Laura finds herself caught up in the struggles between La Estrella and another gang, which may well have infiltrated the police and border agency, trafficking money and weapons across the US-Mexico border as her dream of being 'Miss Baja California' becomes a nightmare.

Shot in rich Technicolour and in a style which - in its careful use of selective focus and fixed and hand-held cameras - dissolves all the predictable dichotomies of good and evil, the film is fast paced and thought-provoking. It gives a real sense, for example, of the dissolution of all sacred social ties by the drug wars, and conveys a sense of the complexity of their dynamic. Friendship and family offer no sanctuary, and the war on drugs is actually, in all cases, shown to be a war 'over' drugs.

The acting is good and the soundtrack unobtrusive. There are moments when the pace slackens and also points at which this viewer felt a little unconvinced. Laura's involvement is a little too sudden and unexpected, and this made me feel that her immediate significance and importance for Lino of La Estrella was a little contrived. Lino Valdez - Jorge Negrete in desert boots - also seemed far too ready to get his hands dirty, making La Estrella look more like a gang of wannabes than a group of professional drug-traffickers. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the film is its portrayal of the passivity and helplessness of Laura. It also seems a bit chaotic in its narrative development.

Certainly worth watching, but what does it show you that you don't already know?

La estrategia del caracol by ex-combatant, Sergio Cabrera, is one of few Colombian films of the 1990s that will be remembered as a national cinematic classic by future generations. It documents the literal eruption into visibility of a community of working-class characters dislodged from their dwelling in the historic centre of Bogotá, their subversive interruption of the abstracting powers of speculative capital, and their recovery of voice within local representational systems.

The film combines humour with a critique of social injustice, whilst at the same time offering a model of how working-class bonds can be maintained in the face of the socially disjunctive effects of capitalism. Thus, as well as offering a hilarious portrait of police inefficiency, it offers serious meditations on 'la injusticia de la justicia', and takes a stance against those who perceive violence as the sole means to resist social injustice. Colombian history may have reduced many dreams to rubble; but as the film shows, no one is going under without defending their dignity to the very end.

An extremely powerful vision of La Violencia: a complex set of upheavals that took place between approximately 1945 and 1965 in Colombia and that combined elements of civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, revolutionary conflicts with the state, and military dictatorship. Vallejo, to cite Carlos Monsiváis, was not exactly a snake charmer when it came to pleasing the mass media at the time, and his films were banned in Colombia as 'apologies of violence'. This decision was, in my view, excessive, and may have had something to do with the State's unwillingness to face its responsibility for the bloodletting. The film was made in Mexico and this slightly detracts from the veracity of the film as a portrayal of these events - Vallejo later complained that the landscapes weren't right. But it does convey the collective insanity and frightening emptiness behind this meaningless 'civil war' - particularly in its disturbing alternation between extreme long-shots and extreme close-ups. A little less Max Factor would have made it more realistic ... but given that cinema and reality are dissolving into one in Colombia's violences, perhaps realism would have been inappropriate in this instance.

A clever use of noir to provoke a series of mediations about history and violence at the end of the century in Colombia. Soplo is set in the context of the Armero disaster in 1985 - a volcanic mudslide which, conveniently for the government, buried investigations about a political tragedy that occurred only a few days before (the incident of the Palacio de Justicia). The film in some senses 'unburies' this tragedy although does not, as viewers will see, refer to the Palacio incident. Instead it uncovers structures of machismo, corruption, drug-trafficking (to some extent) and social breakdown that natural discourses of violence often forget. Aesthetically it is quite heterogeneous, and blends noir scenes (marginal locations, nighttime shots, black and white) with images of the post-apocalyptic landscape of Armero. Great performances all round, a wonderful script, and an absolute feast of cinematic references for film buffs out there who are doubtless more knowledgeable than I am. A breath of life (and of fresh air) for Colombian cinema at the end of the millennium.

An extremely interesting film about La Violencia in Colombia which captures the strange social and political heterogeneity of this dark set of events. Mayolo developed his own aesthetic - partly in collaboration with filmmaker Luis Ospina and the late Andrés Caicedo - 'el gótico tropical' in order to convey this strangeness. The film combines local Colombian myths - caspi, la madremonte, el hojarasquin del monte - with themes of vampirism and incest to convey the place of La Violencia within a repetitive and cyclical history characterised by interpartisan conflicts that benefit the empowerment of the Colombian aristocracy. Opening with a series of cross-cuts showing, alternately, a dying grandmother, and a group of graverobbbers in the countryside of the Cauca region, the film (as suggested by these images) delves deep into the 'other scene' of political life and into the dark quasi- supernatural forces driving it. Whether Mayolo's 'tropical Gothic' works is another matter, and whether it is Gothic or indeed baroque is a question that the spectator might wish to ask him/herself. Some of the performances are strong (particularly Mayolo's own cameo as the family chauffeur-cum 'pájaro'), others, however, are fairly weak - in particular that of Andrés Alfonso and Enrique, the Communist uncle, whose performances waver between the wooden and the melodramatic. The whirring, moaning soundtrack nicely conveys the sense of historical repetition.

Perhaps the first film to deal with La Violencia in any recognisable historical context. This film, shot in black and white, is reminiscent of García Márquez's stories about the small town of Macondo. Set, not on the Caribbean coast, but in the region of Huila in Colombia, it tells of a village's literal and symbolic awakening to La Violencia as a number of bodies are washed up on the river banks of a small village in the Andes. Of course the authorities fail to get to the bottom of what is going on and life carries on as a big party drones out the sound of gunfire. In Colombian cinema, history repeats itself, first as comedy, second time as catastrophe. Now Colombia's rivers have turned red, but in spite of the arrival of colour film since the time of this film's making, few films have managed to capture the true horror of what is going on.