Our Lady of the Assassins is the most recent film by Barbet Schroeder, and his first foreign-language film since Tricheurs in 1983. Shot on video, it's based upon a novel by Fernando Vallejo, which is also the name of the lead character.

Fernando is a gay writer in his mid-50s, and basically he's come back to the city of Medellin to die. For a man who's supposedly so tired of living as he is, though, he makes surprisingly little effort to stop living, especially after he's introduced tp Alexis, a young man with an extremely itchy trigger finger. Fernando and Alexis fall in love, and the film traces their developing romance against the background of Medellin.

Schroeder presents a vision of this city and its people which is pretty damn unflattering. Almost nothing and no one here has anything going for them. The taxi drivers make their counterparts in my city look civil and polite, people kill each other in public (Alexis shoots two people on a crowded train, and later shoots someone else in the middle of a busy street) with gay abandon and for the least offence, and fireworks go off every time a shipment of cocaine makes it into the US. It's bleak, to say the least, as if civilisation has just given up and left the place to rot.

There's a scene where Alexis comments that he needs more ammunition. Fernando, who has hitherto deplored all the violence around him, goes and steals some from a military barracks for him. This reminded me of the scene in Leaving Las Vegas, where you have Nicolas Cage as the alcoholic writer drinking himself to death and Elizabeth Shue as the girlfriend vainly trying to stop him, and she buys him a hipflask to store his whisky in. It's like she's realised he's going to die anyway, so why stop him.

I got a similar feeling from that scene in Our Lady of the Assassins, as if Fernando had given up trying to stop Alexis. And, as with Leaving Las Vegas, that was approximately the point where I gave up on the film myself, because I could tell just how badly it would all end.

I don't know if it's a conservative streak in me or not, but I just don't have an awful lot of use for films like Our Lady of the Assassins. It's not that I have something against depressing films in and of themselves; I don't criticise this film on the grounds that it's grim and ugly. I criticise it for not being anything more than just that. I really don't have a lot of time for depressing films that don't amount to anything more than the sum of their depressing content, and don't offer anything more than that. And though I admit I didn't stick with the film to the end, and that it may have changed in the second half and somehow gone beyond mere violence and mean-spiritedness, I didn't see much in the first half of the film to indicate that things were going to improve any.

Our Lady of the Assassins may be an accurate and honest depiction of how life is in Medellin, but it's a pretty blank one without much insight.