BIFF 2020: Los Conductos
BIFF 2020Jean-Luc Godard once famously summarised his early exploits as ‘barging into cinema like cavemen ransacking the Palace of Versailles of Louis XV’. While he, Truffaut and others weren’t the first to experiment with filmmaking form, their callous disrespect towards storytelling convention sent ripples through the culture at large. Their work reinforced and emboldened the notion that – as Godard himself remarked as well – a story needs to have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in the same order. Tradition was obsolete and filmmakers were openly invited to experiment with how they want to tell their stories.
Camilo Restrepo’s debut feature Los Conductos is an example of what happens when a filmmaker is so preoccupied with dismantling the convention and toying with symbolism that he either forgets to keep the story front and centre of his cinematic experiment or he does not care about doing so in the first place. Put politely, it is a spiritual descendant of the New Wave sentiments which permeated the zeitgeist in the 1960s. Set in the Colombian city of Medellin, Restrepo’s Los Conductos attempts to tell a story about a man who escaped from the clutches of a criminal gang, or a cult, as he embarks on a vendetta against the brutal ringleader of this organisation, occasionally referred to as Father. At least, that’s the best traditional approximation of what the film is likely about, because the filmmaker is far from being straightforward in the way he weaves this tale.
In fact, he borrows this modus operandi from New Wave filmmakers. While Godard’s Band of Outsiders was a heist film without a heist and Le Petit Soldat a spy film without suspense, Los Conductos is a revenge fantasy without character urgency. Structured non-linearly, the film is interlaced with discombobulating pieces of staged visual symbolism. The languid takes of Medellin by night and elements of pure fantasy serve as vehicles for thematic commentary. Restrepo’s film is purposefully convoluted to consistently keep the viewer at arm’s length. Not only does it seem as though the filmmaker did not care about the audience connecting with what he was grappling with in this story, but rather he did not want anyone to decipher his movie at all.
Granted, some aspects of this befuddling puzzle box of visual symbolism are laudable. A keen observer will notice a subtle reference to Fritz Lang’s M in what could be the most pivotal scene imbuing the central character of the story (Luis Felipe Lozano) with some much-needed agency. In a key flashback, he describes the cult he escaped from using a visual of street clowns giving balloons to children. He admits to having a change of heart after witnessing Father perpetrating a ‘horrible act’, which is never mentioned in detail and left almost completely ambiguous. The only hint Restrepo gives the audience is an image of a balloon stuck under a ceiling which is lifted from the aforementioned Lang film and suggests Father killed a child in cold blood.
It is possible, therefore, to find some value in the experience of watching Los Conductos and some viewers will be willing to commit to understanding this hodgepodge of visual tableaus and eventually teasing out Restrepo’s central thesis. But the fact remains that the film is fundamentally inaccessible to viewers who might not possess encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema or the patience needed to relate to some of the scenes the filmmaker views as critical to understanding the story. Thus, the film is likely going to ride right over people’s heads because it is too cryptic to let them latch onto anything, too disjointed to follow with a degree of confidence and too self-indulgent to convince the viewers they should care about anything that goes on in the film anyway.
And that’s a real shame because underneath the thick layer of pretentious imagery and unnecessarily enigmatic cinematic language, Los Conductos hides an interesting thematic heartbeat. At its core, the film is supposed to comment on Colombia’s volatile past and the uncertainty that lies ahead of its society. It is a product of anger at the senseless violence hanging like a looming shadow over Restrepo’s country and, if handled with at least a modicum of artistic self-awareness, the film would have been able to invite the viewer to take part in this discussion.
Unfortunately, Los Conductos drowns its delicate heartbeat in the wall of noise generated by its own artistic self-aggrandisement. It is a tedious bore which is outrageously difficult to sit through, let alone comprehend, all because the filmmaker was hopelessly infatuated with the great iconoclasts of cinema. But the key difference between Camilo Restrepo and the juggernauts of French New Wave is that they cared deeply about the rules they were breaking. On the other hand, this film feels like an equivalent of poetry written by a teenager who discovered he doesn’t have to make his poems rhyme to pass himself off as erudite.
