Remembering OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS during the Week of September 11, 2001, I considered the following scenario:

From the attack by the Huns of Attila on Romanesque Europe in 451 A.D., through the disastrous Christian Crusades beginning in 1095, the Mahdi's challenge for Victoria's Crown Imperial in 1881, the rise of the Anarchists, then Communism around the World, and now, we are told, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden in the skies over America, an arc of extra-national terror swings across the rise, zenith and decline of the Nation States -- and Empire. Powerful Western nations have always needed, even invented these Evil Wizards of Oz like . . . Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden is a symbolic creature of our own making, no matter how real he was when our CIA enlisted him to fight the Russians beyond the Kyhber Pass, for he rises from the fictional mold of Fu Man Chu in THE MASK OF FU MAN CHU (Boris Karloff, 1929), Surat Khan in THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (C. Henry Gordon, 1936), The Black Dragon Society (Bela Lugosi, 1942) and Emanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's novel, 1984. As we shall see, the ghost of Columbia's preeminent Narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar, every bit as real and fictive as Osama bin Laden, wafts in the background of OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS.

Inevitably, as The New World Order saps the sovereignty of smaller governments, these fleshly realities of villainous Emanuel Goldstein's, Fu Man Chu's, Black Dragon Societies, and Surat Khan's become less exotic but ever more furtive, shadowy, deadly, pervasive -- more "real" -- in the rhetoric of Super Powers. These symbolic figures have always stood, and still stand, for the (unrecognized) rage of poor and marginalized people, on whose raw materiel and markets the prosperous nations of the World depend.

The destruction and fatalities of September 11, 2001, and the crazy, frustrated responses which must follow, represent an escalation of the process to a new level, unimaginable in its consequences.

But in this sad time, Barbet Schroeder's visionary metaphoric film, OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, having waited two years for distribution, arrives powerful and germane in American theaters. His film is set not in the Middle East or Afghanistan but in Medillin, Republic of Columbia: America's back yard. We have forgotten, for the moment, the scandals of secrecy that Republican Party operatives whumped up in the 1990's: President Clinton, a murdered CIA operative named Barry Seal, Mena in Arkansas, and Drug Wizard Pablo Escobar of Medillin.

We have developed an understandable amnesia about Escobar and that confusing mix of enigmatic fact and myth known under the rubric of "Whitewater" -- especially in recent days -- but from somewhere behind The Wizard of Medillin's green sheet came hundreds of billions of dollars in Cocaine, which destroyed millions of American lives in our Inner Cities as surely as a Boeing 767 killed thousands in a New York skyscraper last week.

The Cocaine Business, subject of recent films like BLOW and TRAFFIC, also fueled revolutions throughout Central America and the Northern Tier of South America, perhaps down her Western Coast. It provided additional Black Budget funds to Intelligence Agencies' covert operations around the Globe. Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, for instance. And it made young Pablo Escobar, who began by stealing tombstones, and believed the Infant of Prague his Personal Saviour, one of the richest men in the World.

Product of a sustained 50 year Civil War [rooted in Columbia's 1903 loss of land on which the U.S. built the Panama Canal], Escobar moved from revolution and crime to an inconceivable prepotency of narcoterrorism. He spawned several generations of desperate child fanatics who are central to OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS.

So powerful was Escobar in Columbia, that he rode in his hero Al Capone's car, assassinated presidents and senators at will, kidnapped their daughters, maimed investigative TV news anchors, blew up public buildings and swatted attorneys-general and supreme court judges like gadflies. He went far beyond the Latino drug king pin depicted in Brian De Palma's 1983 remaking of SCARFACE.

Anything that Wolfgang Petersen, Ed Zwick, even Fu Man Chu or Osama bin Laden could imagine, on an American or World scale, Pablo Escobar was doing in Columbia in the 1980's and early 1990's.

In the end, like his much less powerful counterpart, General Manuel Noriega in Panama, Escobar overstepped himself, in some way not entirely clear. (They both probably had become embarrassments in the winding down of the Cold War.) When President George H. W. Bush had the United States invade Panama to extradite Noriega in 1990 -- fearing similar action and a Life-plus-130-Year-Sentence of solitary confinement in America -- Pablo Escobar plea-bargained with a handpicked judiciary. He was sent to a Columbian luxury jail of his own design. Despite unlimited comforts, strangely enough, Escobar was shot trying to escape from that jail, before Christmas in 1993.

[In July 2001, the Administration of George W. Bush announced Plan Columbia to provide 1.3 billion dollars to carry on further the Drug War in Columbia, begun by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. The money would, it was said, be used to introduce Green Beret trainers and Black Hawk helicopters into the countryside to eradicate coca crops widely grown by farmers there since the collapse of coffee bean prices in previous decades.]

Escobar's death is some years in the past when Barbet Schroeder's OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS -- Fernando Vallejo's adaptation of his own autobiographical novel -- takes place. In a small but withering fashion, Schroeder presents us the social results of terrorism and state-sponsored anarchy in Medillin, at the end of one of America's Yellow Brick Roads.

[Another U.S. Yellow Brick Road, built by the Black Ops of our Secret Teams in Central Asia, terminated at The World Trade Center last week. Thousands of innocent, unapprehending Americans (and others) joined our clandestine death rolls.]

The hero of OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, Fernando (German Jarmillo), like Author Vallejo, is a renowned Columbian writer, an ex-revolutionary, a homosexual and an atheist/Catholic who has returned from many years of exile in Mexico to his hometown of Medillin. He is on an unsentimental journey to revisit his youth. Fernando comes from a sophisticated, well-educated social class of great elegance, who regard sexual activity as free and innocent. He is well aware that his group, and the traditional anything-goes entrepreneur families supporting them, mix freely with certain governmental figures, drug families, criminals and revolutionaries alike, created in the time of the Drug Troubles.

In other words, Fernando, "the foremost grammarian" of his Nation, as he ironically puts it, represents the Latin counterpart of a privileged American, who has a foot in two worlds. One foot is in the law-abiding societies where he has sojourned. The other is in Medillin (known locally now as Metrallo, "Little Machinegun"), second largest metropolis of Columbia.

Built originally by the Conquistadores, Medillin, in its mountain inaccessibility, is beautiful, wealthy, European-like, and cosmopolitan. But it is also full of crime, poverty, anarchy and murder, for it was Pablo Escobar's Emerald City, where America, with a little help from Pablo's friends, paid homage to those who went along, and destroyed the traditional economy and culture of the people

At 50+, his youthful passions abated, Fernando is looking for peace. His sister, herself the widow of a senior gang leader, has died, leaving him a spacious, if scarcely furnished apartment, which juts out on three sides (with a balcony) above the mountain-hazy glory of Medillin. After he has visited the places of his childhood, he will sit and watch the sunsets for some years . . . listen to Opera. And if then, he should happen to die, well . . . .

First, however, when Fernando attends a welcoming party given by old comrades, his host Alfonso (Manuel Busquets) has a bienvenido for him. In a backroom of Alfonso's luxurious flat, Fernando is introduced to Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), an admiring teenager of great beauty. The older man accepts the gift, as uncommitted well-off men are wont to do, and Alexis is soon a new furnishing for Fernando's apartment.

This liaison, which might be distasteful in other hands, is not because Schroeder avoids any swishy, carnal stereotypes, and gradually objectifies a believable relationship. Alexis has long heard of Fernando although, like a typical modern teenager, he probably has not read anything by him. Nevertheless, the boy is intrigued by the writer's ascerbic, philosophical, sometimes cynical observations; and his energy gives old Fernando a new reason to live. They are attracted to each other in a combination of romantic love, material wealth and father-son bonding.

The tragic kicker is that Alexis is one of the last surviving veteran child-assassins of Pablo Escobar's defunct Medillin Cartel. The nearly 500 rival gangs, the detritus of Escobar, have put a revengeful price on his head. He is to be shot on sight. But Fernando, resembling a superannuated version of Herman Melville's Redburn, has an unreliable map of Medillin in his head which he intends to follow, this one self-made from youthful memories. Despite the danger to his young lover, Fernando's plan is to explore on foot his old Medillin haunts in the company of Alexis. The young man's fatalism and machismo prompts him to ignore his own safety and act as Fernando's body guard.

What, for all his awareness, Fernando has not assimilated is the chaotic, anarchic culture which in his absence has burst forth, as it does in all nations, when people lose faith in their ideals, their government, their belief in rules and law. After the death of Escobar, and the collapse of his Cartel, the rival, smaller gangs are fighting for dominance among themselves in an endless round of dissing, scapegoating and revenge. What they have wrought has profound implications for Alexis, Fernando -- and for us.

As the relationship progresses, the different approaches to life of a civilized adult and a wild child are contrasted against a background of nihilism. For instance, both love music, but Fernando can't stand heavy metal and rap. When he loses his temper and throws the boom-box he bought the lad off the balcony, Alexis restrains himself from harming Fernando, but shoots Maria Callas in the TV set, saying that she sounds as if she were being strangled.

Fair enough, but one day going to visit a favorite old cathedral, now known as "Our Lady of the Assassins," Fernando complains about the loudness of a taxi radio, and the driver tells him what to do with his complaint. Alexis, to show his love, simply shoots the man in the head, and leads horrified, frightened Fernando away the idling cab.

At first, Fernando and Alexis engage in a philosophical argument, which resonates in America today. From Alexis' standpoint, if someone is rude or insults you, that is what you carry a weapon for. Fernando, reflecting his cynical and tired liberalism, argues: "Killing them is a favor. Let them live. It's what the bastards deserve."

There will be consequences when the police look into the death of the cab driver, Fernando maintains.

But no police investigate the murder. Authorities have ceased to pay attention to crime, and Fernando slowly becomes a co-dependent of his lover. When a drummer on a balcony opposite keeps him awake at night, he gratefully just turns over to sleep after Alexis kills the musician. It is one of a series of casual murders by the boyish Alexis.

For all his mature philosophy, Fernando's disposition, re-shaped in blase Western circles, causes him to be an inadvertent Ying representing American attitudes for the hometown Yang of Alexis. For instance, when a poor pregnant beggar approaches them with two small children, he snaps: "Beg for Pesos from the person who knocked you up!" At another point, in a paraphrase of a common American remark about gang violence, he fumes, "Once they used machetes -- now guns!" In an idiosyncratic observation, he laments how people whistle when only birds should do so, but surveying the murders and carnage, Fernando takes on an Existentialist tone: "God has failed -- Satan has won."

As the OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS progresses, we accept that, in Medillin, murder is no more serious than a parking violation. We begin to notice the vultures wheeling in the sky above the lovely city. We see the sign in a park which announces: DUMP NO CORPSES. Beside which are several of bodies in various states of decomposition.

And continually, there are reminders that America made Medillin one of the Drug Capitals of the World. Early on, Fernando admires a magnificent fireworks display, and he asks Alexis, what is the occasion? Alexis explains that different neighborhoods (at work packaging Cocaine) celebrate when a big shipment has been successfully smuggled into the United States. Fireworks become like starlight in the Medillin sky, and although we don't see evidence of Fernando, Alexis (or other major characters) using Cocaine, sex is being traded for the stuff in the back of a church the pair visit.

And of course, Alexis is being tracked down by sicarios, fellow assassins. He consecrates cartridges for his 9mm Beretta in Holy Water, in order to have the maximum defense. He is warned of impending attacks by a surreal, pale friend: Death Boy. And when they finally come, the assassins are mounted on Kawasaki motor bikes, the shooter firing wildly, cowboy-style, from the shoulders of his driver.

Alexis triumphs in the first attack, but before the end of the movie, in an ironic nod to both Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958), an ever more despairing Fernando must seek out Wilmar (Juan David Restrepo) as a replacement for his truly lost avenging angel.

Shot with high definition video cameras on location in Medillin by Rodrigo Lalindo (RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO), with a wide variety of music from Jorge Arrigada, OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS is a tragedy of two doomed classes: the superfluous cultured and the hopeless young. It shows the logical consequences of financing the destabilization of governments with clandestine violence and addicting products, sponsored by the New World Order. For whatever noble cause announced as a motive for the process, the methods used to further it -- in Ireland, in the Middle East, in Central Africa, Central Asia or in Central America -- caused bloody desolation for decades, which gradually seeped back into the United States, and last week threatened to become a flood.

[The Leaders of our Secret Team, long relegated to backrooms, consultant positions, plea bargaining and late night economic or political talk shows, are back, front and center. Their colleagues in the Bush Administration tout them once more. Watch their faces appear on TV now: Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Lawrence Eagleburger; and that ratty-faced former Under Secretary of State (whose name I can never remember), who plea-bargained perjury, but recently joined the new Administration.]

The terrorism in New York and Washington was horrendous, but President Bush's vague, open ended, cliche-studded, jingoistic, scatter-gun plan -- filled in and implemented -- will be destructive to the World and infinitely more so to ourselves.

Note President Bush and his Team intend to "smoke 'em out," "dig 'em out of their caves,""dead or alive." They boast (like Daddy Bush) that "it will not stand," and that Osama bin Landen "can run but can't hide."

Ask the sick veterans of the Gulf War. Ask sad-eyed Saddam Hussein, alive and well in Iraq.

The Team intends to use (openly) the corrupt agents and assets responsible for the society shown in OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, the guys who created the same kind of terror wherever they have operated, corrupting societies and assassinating whoever they please.

As I listened to our President, and these members of The Team, speak nebulously of "The War on Terrorism" on various TV ops, I thought of OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, and said to the screen: "This is madness. We have to stop these guys. They intend to revenge our dead by doing more of what caused their slaughter!"

And of course, they intend "a million reserves called up within two years," and "will not rule out the use of tactical Atomic Weapons," in "a Crusade which may last decades."

The word Crusade is one of the most hated and feared words in the Middle East, for attended by only minor royalty and errant knights, Pope Urban II exhorted the Christian Faithful at Cleremont, France, in 1095, to liberate the Holy Land. The idea was so little thought out that it took several years for Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus to implement it for Western Christianity, but once set in motion, it required seven crusades and nearly 200 years, at the end of which the Crusaders had laid waste to the Middle East, had failed, were exhausted, and required a couple of hundred years to recover.

Deus Vult! God's Will!

Born in Iran of a Bolivian mother and a Swiss father, Director Barbet Schroeder was raised in Columbia, where he saw at age seven a revolutionary beheaded in the street. It is perhaps not surprising that Fernando remarks, "This is not Switzerland!"

Moving to France, and then to Hollywood, he made such films as GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA (1974), MAITRESS (1976), BARFLY (1987), REVERSAL OF FORTUNE (1990) and SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1995), before returning to the dangerous moral ruin of his childhood home for OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS.

Schroeder's production was repeatedly threatened, and his players German Jarmillo (Columbia's foremost actor), along with amateurs Anderson Ballesteros and Juan David Restepo, warned of assassination or kidnapping. (According to Schroeder, Ballesteros has since been severely beaten.)

Schroder said at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where I saw the film in April, that he fears the United States may break down tribally and become like the Columbia meticulously described in OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS. He told us that everything observed in the film was taking place as they shot in Medillin, including the drug fireworks celebrations, which were added to the script on location.

In the blaze of recent days, real foreign terror on massive scale has come to America at last. Elements of THE DIE HARD's (1988-1995), AIRFORCE ONE (1997), and THE SIEGE (1998) could not match what appeared on Television from New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001. We stand among multiple shattered mirrors, like those at the end of Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948), looking for Osama bin Laden's -- not recognizing ourselves in the reflections.

We are now embarked on a "Crusade," a "War" (like wars since Pearl Harbor, undeclared and, in my reading of the Constitution, illegal and highly destructive to the fabric of our Democracy). Over the next several years, if a million fat, well-oiled, revengeful Americans sit around in bars, cheering between ball games the annihilation of distant poor innocents, you might remember Fernando's assessment of mankind: "When people sit and cheer for 22 childish adults kicking a ball around, we're screwed."

Remember, too, that, during the Crusades, the ball was a human head.

When the scenario of OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS is played out in the Crusade of George W. Bush, the response of the wretched and powerless of the Earth may well be: One Man, One Atomic Bomb.

The Oro Mundados and Jehadi's will martyr themselves for another thousand years, and nothing short of Adolph Hitler's Final Solution will stop them.

Remember as W. H. Auden, on the Eve of World War II, reminded his fellow bar patrons in "September 1, 1939" (widely quoted last week): " . . . Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return . . . ."

Those words are true everywhere, and across the millennia.

And remember OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS. It has become much more worth your time since I first saw it last Spring.

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UPDATE -- September 27, 2001: A number of experts are now stepping forward to, coincidently, support my suggestion that United States clandestine forces left behind them chaos after the rout of Russian forces from Afghanistan in 1989, by default allowing people like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden to become powers in the region.

The situation created in Afghanistan was not dissimilar to that which evolved in the Columbia depicted in OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS.

As for "The War on Terrorism," it appears that some of the early jingoistic hyperbole has been tempered. Misfortunately, we shall not adopt a wise, compassionate program of providing the people of Central Asia the means to satisfy their elemental needs, thus sapping the strength of Islamic fanaticism, but with Winter proper, and temperatures of 40 degrees below zero, due in Afghanistan by the end of October, the reality of the situation has become apparent to many in the White House.

For all those who applauded President Bush's popular battle cry, many volunteer field command positions have now opened up. It seems "The War," when it comes, will be another CIA-run proxy war, similar to those we carried out in Central America, Afghanistan and other places in the 1980's. Once again, look at the Medillin of Schroeder's OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, look at New York City, to foresee the results!

Madness.

















Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age