Anyone see the movie Rosario Tijeras yet?

toneloc24 says on Aug 14, 2005, 20:30:

Here's a review of the book that it was based on.

"Latin American literature, and particularly Colombian literature (thanks to Gabriel García Márquez) have become synonymous with magical realism in the eyes of many readers. Recently however, many Colombian novelists, including Jorge Franco, have been taking the “magical” out of “magical realism,” creating vivid, gritty, and noirish portraits of contemporary urban Colombia. This new breed of Colombian novelists has won critical acclaim throughout Europe and Latin America and is slowly making its way to these shores.

Rosario Tijeras is Jorge Franco’s first U.S. publication and imaginatively balances a tale of Colombia’s enticing but violent drug underworld with subtle portraits of its main characters. The novel’s narrator, Antonio, like most men, is transfixed by Rosario Tijeras. Rosario is a beautiful, mysterious woman, who became an assassin for a drug cartel by way of her older brother. She is also the lover of Antonio’s best friend Emilio, a fact which Antonio lives with uneasily.

The novel opens with Rosario being rushed to the hospital after being shot by a mysterious assailant. (“Since Rosario had been shot at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love.”) As Antonio sits in the waiting room, he recounts his brushes with the Colombian underworld and the complex relationship that developed between him, Rosario, and Emilio.

Franco structures his narrative to build the reader’s understanding of Rosario slowly while maintaining her mystery. Touched with humor and warmth, Rosario Tijeras brilliantly adopts the crime novel to contemporary Colombia. Franco gives us a novel that is at once riveting, touching, and insightful."

"Don't tase me, bro!!!!"

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Mamey says on Aug 14, 2005, 22:05:

good quality movie Not that i have seen all Colombian made productions, but production wise "Rosario Tijeras" is the best I've seen.

The lighting , sound and cinematography was of very good quality.

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caslug says on Aug 15, 2005, 07:32:

Tone.. Thanks for comment on the movie, i was tempted to go but wasnt sure if there was subtitle or not. If not, then i´ll have to wait, unless there is lots of eye candy!

BTW, I returned to Medellin yesterday evening, i called your hotel, but you check out already. Too bad we couldnt hit the town together. chris66 and i went partying parque llerlas and hit replupica last night.

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toneloc24 says on Aug 15, 2005, 08:58:

It's not subtitled at all. All Spanish. Even the low-down gringo in film speaks in Spanish. There's plenty of eye-candy in the movie, and sitting in the movies all around you. I saw it at Oviedo on a Saturday evening.

I left my hotel for the airport at 5:45 a.m. on Sunday. I had a 7:20 a.m. flight to BOG, then back to the USA. I had already done Republica and Blue on Thursday night. Saturday night, just hung out at Berlin a little. Nothing too crazy going on. Had to leave early in the morning. Never did catch up with Chris66. Hope he's enjoying himself.

"Don't tase me, bro!!!!"

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toneloc24 says on Aug 15, 2005, 12:48:

Found another review of the novel. This one from the San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/07/RVG7V58THE1.DTL

Shot through her heart at an early age
Novel offers a provocative look at the Medellin cocaine cartel's rise to power
Reviewed by Timothy Peters

Sunday, March 7, 2004

"Femme fatale" doesn't begin to describe the character whose name is used as the title of this luridly sensational novel set in Medellin, Colombia, during that city's infamous cocaine cartel's rise to power. The mercurial Rosario Tijeras attracts everyone -- men with her seductive power, women with her blood-soaked will. Her first name may echo the Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary, but her last name (the Spanish word for "scissors") is altogether more fitting; it's bestowed on her after the 13-year-old Rosario uses a pair of sewing shears to castrate a man who raped her.

Rosario Tijeras is the literal embodiment of a femme fatale -- the rapist was merely her first victim -- and she animates this undeniably powerful but flawed novel by Jorge Franco, a best-selling author in his native Colombia. Sex, love and destruction form a kind of unholy trinity in the figure of Rosario, but Franco's second novel (his first to be published in the United States) is ultimately more interested in crafting an allegory of the greed-fueled destruction of Medellin in the 1980s.

The novel begins with a startling, powerful sentence: "Since [they shot her] at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love." Gravely wounded, Rosario is on her way to the hospital, accompanied by her long-suffering admirer Antonio. In a series of flashbacks, he narrates her story (their story, Medellin's story), and makes it clear that Rosario's confusion about pain, death and love began much earlier.

She was born in the hillside slums that surround and overlook Medellin, a world of violence and vengeance far removed from the world of Antonio and his best friend, Emilio, sons of the city's wealthier, more European ruling class. She is raped, the first time at the age of 8; when her brother kills the man, he starts becoming the right kind of "soldier" for the Cartel. The nascent cocaine industry gave Rosario's brother and his friends the opportunity to make money, to express their power, to rise above their class and rub shoulders with the city's elite. Tagging along with him and his friends, Rosario meets Antonio and Emilio at a nightclub, "one of those places that attracted the lower classes who were beginning to rise and those of us among the upper classes who were beginning to fall."

The two young men are seduced instantly by this emergent class: "bigger men than we, bigger hell-raisers. ... [And] hot mestizo women ... belonging more to this land than our women, more agreeable and less snotty." Emilio becomes Rosario's lover; Antonio her confidante. They soon learn plenty of Rosario's past, but also of her present, as a kind of sexual servant for the gang and as a hit woman, a position that highlights her dependence on men (but for them, she'd still be in the slums) and her own capacity for willful violence.

Rosario is completely corrupted by the men she grew up with, and Emilio is thoroughly corrupted by his relationship with Rosario ("he was up to his neck in crimes, debts, and problems"). Antonio keeps a little more distance, but he's completely enamored with Rosario, afraid to tell her of his love -- with good reason, given that Rosario has never really known a love that was selfless. In her world, love is at best a derisive idea; at worst, it is brutally destructive.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fourth "character" in the novel, the city of Medellin, which quickly devolves into a war zone, filled with terror, blood and devastation: "Every day bombs weighing hundreds of pounds would wake us, leaving an equal number of people burned by the fires and of buildings reduced to their skeletons."

The problem here is that Rosario feels more like an intellectual conceit than a palpable, flesh-and-blood character. She and the novel itself labor under a heavy symbolic load: "Life weighs on [Rosario] with the weight of this country, her genes drag along a race of sons of plenty and sons of bitches who with the blade of a machete cleared the pathways of life. ... Once proud, we are now ashamed, without understanding how, why, and when it all happened."

That's evocative prose (the book was translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa), but the lack of subtlety makes the novel seem more polemical than it should. And besides, the "why" is pretty obvious: The greed of the cocaine cartel became so enormous that nothing could stand in its way.

Nonetheless, Franco is clearly onto something powerful with his leading lady, who very nearly transcends her symbolic role to become a figure of real interest, a living, breathing contradiction. She loves the turmoil, she thrives on destruction: "For Rosario, the war was ecstasy, the realization of a dream, the detonation of her instincts. 'It really makes it worth living here,' she said."

It's Franco's willingness to articulate that kind of heretical idea that animates the book -- heretical because an objective, rational observer would never utter such a sentiment (of course, if Franco were an objective, rational observer, he'd be a sociologist, not a novelist). "Rosario Tijeras" is a good novel about a worthy subject (and one that will be unfamiliar to most American readers), but it would be much more compelling if Rosario were freed of some of the author's heavy-handed symbolism. There's more than a germ of an interesting idea in this book, but, ultimately, novels command real interest not for their ideas but for the ways in which they humanize and dramatize emotion and experience.

"Don't tase me, bro!!!!"

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romy says on Aug 6, 2008, 03:22:

I was able to re-watch it as it just played on HBO during my spell of insomnia.

I definitely gained a different perspective on the movie. I used to really like Rosario because of her tigress character. However, her failure to evolve is heartbreaking. I very much feel for Emilio and in a sense relate to him. He is caught up in between worlds, one that he is tired of and doesn't want, then the other that he doesn't belong and is not wanted. Antonio is much too weak to be admirable, his nobleness is unrealistic and therefore fails to impress.

Anyways, I enjoyed watching the movie and understanding some of the cultural context that I probably didn't pick up on when the movie first came out.

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GregYohn says on Aug 7, 2008, 08:03:

Hola!

I saw the movie recently last month. I put on the subtitles, so I could read the Spanish. I could not understand the verbal Spanish. I understood most of the dialogue, even with a little Spanish knowledge.

I thought the movie was sad and also a bit dated. Now, Medellin is alot different and when it was 1st shown, it reflected a time when the book was written.

12VOIP.com gives free calls to Colombia.Greg

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