Our Lady of the Assassins. Directed by Barbet Schroeder. Written by Fernando Vallejo based on his novel. With Germán Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets, and Juan Carlos Álvarez. A Paramount Classics release. At the Avon.

Here's a fantasy that might appeal to those getting along in years: you're old and waiting for death, but in the meantime you have a teenage lover to share your walk through the past and blow away any present-day annoyances with a 9mm Beretta.

Based on the brief, autobiographical 1994 novel by Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo, who also is credited with writing the script, Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins offers a mordant gaze at the end of civilization as we know it while affirming the power of love and of memory. As such it rehabilitates the best aspects of its source, a bilious screed of hackneyed nihilism. A second-rate de Sade or Celine, a mean-spirited Verlaine with a gun-toting, non-verbal Rimbaud in tow, Fernando Vallejo hates everything and believes in nothing, except God when he's looking for something else to hate. Schroeder, no stranger to cynicism and black humor with such films as Reversal of Fortune to his credit, nonetheless recognizes that such excess of disillusionment, pessimism, and misanthropy is itself a kind of sentimentality, and he injects into Lady qualities that the author might have intended but that don't come through: tenderness, compassion, and a Swiftian irony.

Maybe he achieves that in part because he doesn't allow the caviling voice of Fernando (Germán Jaramillo) to drown everything else out. His relentless ranting emerges instead as the occasional barbed bon mot, as when he's first introduced to Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros) at the tony, security-gated apartment of a friend he's visiting after being away from Medellín for 30 years. As the boy undresses in a room set aside for such assignations, its walls wryly hung with dozens of stopped clocks, his gun falls to the floor. "Take it away," Fernando says, "or I'll put a bullet in my heart."

He may be all talk, but Alexis is not. He can't do anything about his older lover's lament of things past, though his hand touching Fernando's as he tears up with nostalgia at a café from his childhood is one of the film's many fleet but lingering touches of pathos. But as a hitman in a town reduced to the moral level of an especially bloody video game, Alexis can take care of the irritations of the moment. When Fernando complains of a noisy neighbor, kapow!, the next day he's a goner. The same goes for a homophobic, machete-wielding cab driver and a pair of yokels on the metro who don't appreciate the talents of "Colombia's foremost grammarian." It gets almost funny, but not nearly as out of control as in the original book, where Fernando estimates the death toll at 250, many of the victims children and pregnant women, in a futile attempt to satisfy a philosophy that holds that "everything that exists is guilty, and if it reproduces, even more so." Sometimes the nihilism verges into simple misogyny, which seems ironic given the killers' (and the writer's?) adoration of the virgin of the title.

Meanwhile, Alexis himself is targeted by hitmen as young as himself, and despite the warnings of the overly allegorical Dead Boy, one suspects that he won't be able to pick off every 15-year-old punk with a gun on a motorscooter. Like the couple in L.I.E. (and why did that film, which has no overt sex or nudity or serial killings, get an NC-17 while this got an R?), their love is doomed, but for different reasons. As Schroeder and Vallejo suggest with Lady's twisted coda, love, like life and hell, is endlessly circular but ever inventive in the ways it disappoints and devastates.

Perhaps Lady's greatest achievement is in the way it fuses the hallucinatory with the precisely realistic, the giddily hilarious with the unspeakably horrifying. Shot on the fly on the streets of Medellín in dourly tinted, high-definition video, it's like a home movie that inadvertently captures an atrocity in the corner of the frame. Fernando visits churches and dreams about them, he witnesses casual slaughter and sleeps in the killer's arms, and it all seems a nightmare designed for his delectation.

At times, though, Schroeder points out the obvious: the abyss of poverty that gives birth to monsters like Alexis, the bankruptcy of wealth that gives birth to monsters like Fernando. When Fernando gazes into the eyes of a street urchin snorting glue, he comments with an epicure's taste on the horror he observes there. The commentary isn't necessary; Schroeder is shooting the real thing.

Issue Date: October 19 - 25, 2001