Our Lady of the Assassins.

Our Lady of the Assassins * Written by Fernando Vallejo * Directed by Barbet Schroeder * Starring German Jaramillo and Anderson Ballesteros * Paramount Classics

Fernando, the middle-aged gay writer who propels Our Lady of the Assassins, raises morbidity to an art. When asked why his apartment has no stereo, he says, "I'm training for the silence of the grave." Asked why he has returned to his Medellin birthplace after 40 years, he replies, "I've come home to die."

Such old-toad whining could almost be funny if Medellin were not the hellhole we see in Barbet Schroede's darkly alluring new love story, adapted from Fernando Vallejo's semiautobiographical screenplay. One would be hard-pressed to think of a more conducive environment for dropping dead than this scenic but explosively violent Colombian city, where all the wrong people (they are legion) pack guns and even day is a Series 7-style survival game whose object is to make it past sunset with your blood supply intact.

Rather than get his death wish, Fernando (the dashingly rumpled German Jaramillo) hooks up with a beautiful young thug named Alexis (the fine Anderson Ballesteros, a nonactor discovered selling incense on the street), the sole surviving member of a street gang. Attracted by Fernando's erudition, antigovernment cynicism, and endless cash flow (a Mafia legacy from his sister), Alexis falls hard for fernando, becoming his lover and personal angel of death. If a taxi driver is insolent, out comes Alexis's pistol. If a neighbor bothers Fernando with nocturnal drum playing, bang, gone.

Fernando makes some effort to reform Alexis ("Let them live; it's what they deserve"), but mostly he is content to roam the streets with his impulsive stud puppy, dispensing sardonic comments and learning to appreciate life through the eyes of a young man whose days are truly numbered. The tension of the inevitable pulls tautly at the lovers, like a mousetrap spring ready to snap at the slightest provocation.

Violence is abundant and disturbingly matter-of-fact in Our Lady of the Assassins. While we never become inured to Alexis's homicidal fits, we shudder at the knowledge of how close Medellin is in spirit to the indifference that has sprung up in our own backyards. Death and homosexuality have long been intimate bedfellows in film and literature. For a change, sodomy has nothing to do with it.

Stuart is the author of The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robed Altman's Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster).