A former cult member tries to restore his life.
A couple of times in this short and occasionally exhilarating feature from Colombia, its director, Camilo Restrepo, contrives striking visual juxtapositions. His camera closes in on a dead man’s white shirt, soaked in blood, and focuses on the bullet hole in both the shirt and the man’s chest. It then cuts to a bright red motorcycle fuel tank and a gasoline nozzle going into it. The dark circular hood of a ceiling security camera is replaced by the sight of a gray balloon expanding while being filled with helium.
What these connections add up to is … enigmatic. Shot on 16-millimeter film stock that seems as rich in specks and cracks as it is in color, “Los Conductos” takes a long way around in telling its story, one of loneliness, defiance and intractable yearning. Luis Felipe Lozano, an itinerant laborer and nonactor whom Restrepo met in 2013, plays Pinky, a character whose life is based on Lozano’s own. Circuitously, Pinky speaks in voice-over about falling in with a group of people “united by a sense of loss we felt in the world.” But for almost half of the movie, we see him alone. He gazes at Medellín from high ground; he steals a motorcycle; he wields a gun.
It is only late in the movie that we piece together his involvement with a cult, and his subsequent desire to seek revenge against its leader, referred to as Father. Father seems, on closer scrutiny, to be nothing more than a ringleader of thieves; in one shot, he holds a messy ball of copper wire, obviously ripped out of stolen electronics.
Like “Days of the Whale” (2020), Restrepo’s movie shows us a Medellín that’s far from action-movie drug cartel clichés. Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.
Los Conductos
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
