Pinky (Luis Felipe Lozano) has finally done it: tonight he has shot dead the man he and the rest of the cult he belonged to called "father", even though he was around the same age as they were, and now he has a chance of being free. But having achieved this goal, he is unsure of what to do next, still armed with a pistol and with a motorbike to take him through the streets of this Colombian city he calls home, so he rides, picks up some drugs to smoke, and sets about settling down for the evening...
Los Conductos was the debut feature for painter Camilo Restrepo, who had cut his teeth making similarly abstract short films. With his artist's eye he was able to assemble a selection of striking images, all linked as a tribute to his friend Pinky who had suffered his troubles in their homeland, as so many millions had, with the social issues blighting the nation. We were taken on a tour of the aspects of the subject's existence that would shape him, from the black market to the religion to the narcotics.
This involved a lot of shots of, for instance, screen printers creating counterfeit T-shirts with brand logos on them, since presumably they sold better than plain white shirts in a sad indictment of consumerism. Something like that, for there were a number of stretches here where quite was Restrepo was getting at would be baffling to the majority of those who did not have his experience of Colombian life, so personal and rooted to the community that they would not be as relevant to the outsiders.
Which would be most people, albeit the countries around Colombia would be enduring the same kind of problems as they were, the corruption, the poverty, the criminality, and so forth. Some compared the director's technique to Alejandro Jodorowsky, presumably because this was from a similar part of the world and they found its relentlessly symbolic visuals hard to work out, but there was a more socially committed angle to this which had the comparisons faltering: there was nothing included here, no matter how striking, that approached the wild, surreal madness of Jodorowsky at his most inspired.
Therefore what was on offer was a collection of Colombia-specific references as Restrepo regarded them, from the TV clowns of his childhood to the gangster classes who effectively ran the nation to various degrees, producing the goods and keeping their power under control with gun violence and a drug addicted underclass who provided a steady income for them. Although there was much to admire in the colours recreated here, from the jungles to the prints, even to the balls of copper wire stolen from the electricity department, and a regular appearance of a marching band that Pinky joyously joins for the grand finale, there was obviously a room for improvement here that bothered the director and fuelled the tensions between what you could see and what you could hear. Just don't be surprised if you don't manage to pull it all together until the poem appears at the end credits. Music by Arthur B. Gillette.
