Much as some of us might want to deny it, the seamier side of life often makes for some great stories and, yep, even some great art. By the same token, there are more than a few artistes out there, particularly of the cinematic variety, who seem to think that the mere steeping of their project in the soiled underbelly of existence guarantees automatic artistic credibility, and, if they're real lucky, even some sort of limited commercial success. That's a dangerously shallow and irresponsible assumption, and, like many shallow and irresponsible assumptions, it inevitably just makes for a whole lot more crap in our world.
That said, it would be equally shallow and irresponsible to suggest that the filmmakers responsible for Under Hellgate Bridge were in any way aware that they were making a crappy movie. After all, its milieu (rough and tumble Italian-Irish in Astoria Queens) seems authentic enough, and it's hard to fault the film's subject matter and message (the evils of the ongoing, interlocking cycles of crime and drug addiction). And yet, to be painfully blunt about it, there seems very little reason for Under Hellgate Bridge to exist. With minor variations, the movie is basically just a clumsy regurgitation of other, better movies, most notably the nearly 30-year-old ghost of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.
Writer-director Michael Sergio tells the story of reformed junkie Ryan (Michael Rodrick), a lantern-jawed, urban warrior who returns to his old stomping grounds in Astoria only to discover a world of seedy, soap-operatic activity. In no time flat, Ryan learns that both of his younger brothers have succumbed to the drug that nearly destroyed him — one brother has recently OD'ed, while the other is now hopelessly addicted. As if that weren't enough to set a heroic, reformed junkie's blood to boiling, Ryan's ex-girlfriend, for whom he still carries a major torch, turns out to have married his arch enemy (Jonathan LaPaglia), a sadistic local mobster who keeps the whole neighborhood supplied with those nasty narcotics.
Although the film is occasionally successful at creating a mood of moderately gritty realism (several of the actors playing junkies really do look like junkies), it constantly undermines itself with a steady stream of gaffes, simplifications and outright idiocies that can't help but call attention to the movie's serious lack of insight and originality. Sergio's narrative skills are a bit primitive, to say the least, and characters and plot points are routinely introduced in a manner both awkward and jarringly abrupt.
Dialogue is often pretty banal and made to seem even more so thanks to a hackneyed and overblown musical score that underlines all of the movie's most generic tendencies. The acting is uneven, with most of the male leads striving to channel a young DeNiro or Keitel, while several other, less visible performers — ones playing local Mafiosos and a kindly old priest — are straight out of Central Casting.
There's a bright side to this picture, but to discover the light in all the cruel, uncomely darkness, you'll have to look beyond Under Hellgate Bridge, to the other non-mainstream film opening alongside it at Channelside this week. The film is called Our Lady of the Assassins and it's a movie that grounds itself firmly in the pain and casual brutality of life, but inexplicably manages to find a strange poetry and maybe even a sort of grace somewhere within all that suffering. It's a tough film to swallow but a remarkable one, and quite possibly one of the year's very best.
One of the most remarkable things about Our Lady of the Assassins is that it was directed by Barbet Schroeder, a man mostly known for his work in and around the mainstream, with smart but resolutely commercial hits like Reversal of Fortune, Barfly and the luridly satisfying Single White Female. Schroeder's roots, though, lie in some of the most visionary EuroArt films of the '60s and '70s, and once every couple of decades or so, the director surprises us with something very like a return to form. Our Lady of the Assassins is more than a mere return to form; it is probably the best thing Schroeder's ever done.
The director collaborated closely here with the controversial, Colombia-born writer Fernando Vallejo, who wrote the script about an esteemed but infinitely weary writer — named Fernando Vallejo — who returns home to Colombia and quickly finds himself up to his eyeballs in sex and death. The middle-aged Fernando (German Jaramillo) claims he's come home to die but finds love instead, in the form of a handsome young male prostitute named Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), a product of the city's lawless jungle. Fernando has his own unique notions of morality ("Virtue is for the dead" is only one of his many memorable war cries) but Alexis, like most of the street kids of Medellin, is way beyond good and evil. The boy carries a gun to protect himself from dangerous types who "love him in a hateful way" (it's complicated) and spends much of the film's running time pumping bullets into anyone who looks at him cross-eyed.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Our Lady of the Assassins is its ability to weave together the most ravishing and the most horrifying of images and ideas, beginning with Alexis, who is cold-blooded but somehow strangely angelic. Make no mistake: This is a love story set in Hell. Even when lovers kiss and fireworks explode above their heads, we learn that the display is just some local drug runners signaling that a narcotics shipment has made it successfully into the U.S.
Much of what happens here unfolds with the tragic inevitability of modern myth, resulting in a love story that is also a horror story, and often both at the same time. Eventually it all begins to seem a bit like a South American take on Death in Venice redone as a sort of buddy picture, albeit a buddy pic that might have done Jean Genet or Pasolini or even Bunuel proud. Although punctuated by bursts of extreme violence, the film's tone is largely contemplative and even a touch literary, dominated by Fernando's state-of-the-world monologues. All that talk tends to get a bit pretentious and even oppressive from time to time, but the whole thing is rarely less than fascinating.
Schroeder risked life and limb filming Our Lady of the Assassins in the actual mean streets of Medellin, shooting quickly on digital video in order to avoid the sort of attention that might have prompted a kidnapping or a quick bullet in the head to someone in the crew. The decision to shoot the film on DV was inspired, bringing a raw but elegant immediacy to Our Lady of the Assassins that perfectly suits its subject matter. There's something of the painterly in the film's look, but it's also eerily present and hyper-real, so that when we watch the numerous, chaotic scenes of bloody carnage in the streets, it's almost like we're watching it happen live on CNN.
Similarly, many of the young hustlers and street kids in the film were played by their real life counterparts, and the sense of reality, although not particularly polished, is uncomfortably palpable. The merging of life and art recalls yet another remarkable Colombian production, 1991's Rodrigo D: No Future. It's been reported that every one of the child "actors" in that film was killed in gun battles within five years of the movie's release. We can only hope fate, or at least life, will be kinder to the young actors in Schroeder's haunted and haunting film. At the very least, the beautiful, brutal lives on display in Our Lady of the Assassins will live on in memory long after the film fades from theaters. Which is a lot more than one can say for the pantomimed pain in Under Hellgate Bridge.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2001.