Los Conductos Review: An Impressionistic Picture of Colombia’s History of Violence

Camilo Restrepo’s Los Conductos is a meditation on the violence of Colombian society, as well as a quasi-biographical portrait of its lead actor, Luis Felipe Lozano, who in real life and in the film goes by the nickname Pinky. A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, Restrepo’s film employs a diverse array of aesthetic strategies, ranging from slow-cinema long takes to documentary-like observations of laboring workers. And Restrepo packs the film with a dense network of literary references to works by Colombian poet Gonzalo Arango and Spanish novelist Luis Vélez de Guevara.

Alas, it’s not always clear what Restrepo is driving at with all of these allusions and shifts in style. More often than not, they get in the way of our ability to understand Pinky. For all of Restrepo’s discursions from traditional narrative structure, Pinky is most cognizable when Los Conductos simply tells his story without adornment, such as in the bravura wordless 10-minute opening passage, in which Pinky kills a man we will later come to learn is the leader of a religious sect, steals a motorcycle, and holes up in an abandoned warehouse.

A nocturnal Bressonian neo-noir in miniature, the film’s opening sequence pulses with a quietly propulsive rhythm, exemplified by the playful match cut between a blood-oozing bullet wound and the opening of a motorcycle’s fuel tank. The rat-a-tat tempo of this opening pulls us immediately and effectively into Pinky’s headspace, and its culminating moment—a prolonged double-exposure shot of Pinky, alone in his new squat, vibing out to some music—captures his overwhelming sense of relief at having reached safety.

Whole sections of Los Conductos are dominated by Pinky’s voiceover narration, which is abundant in details about his background and metaphysical ruminations. Restrepo typically juxtaposes those ruminations with largely unrelated documentary-like images, such as mesmerizing shots of the labor at a T-shirt printing factory. But as the film jumps between flashbacks, dream sequences, and folkloric discursions, it can be difficult to keep track of what exactly is happening to Pinky at any given time, much less comprehend what it all means.

Shot on warm, grainy 16mm, Los Conductos’s visuals are invariably striking, with even extremely low-lit nighttime shots charged with a haunting stillness. Restrepo frames shots with a stripped-down simplicity that directs our attention to totemic objects like Pinky’s revolver, on which the phrase “esta es mi vida,” which translates to “this is my life,” is carved into the handle. There’s an ethereal quality to Restrepo’s images, as if the objects, environments, and people they show exist in the uncanny realm of dreams.

It’s easy enough to submit to the film’s gorgeously evocative images, which are anchored by the magnetic yet ambiguous presence of Lozano’s face. Restrepo shoots Lozano in the dark of night, riding his motorcycle through the streets of Medellín, and in front of fabric imprinted with flames that suggest a minimalist version of hell. But no matter his surroundings, Lozano’s eyes gaze directly into the camera, his world-weary eyes suggesting a haunted, unreconciled past as his lips betray a subtle smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s.

Pinky’s isolation in the frame, as well as his omnipresent voiceover, suggests that Los Conductos may be read as an impressionistic temperature read of the character’s mental environment, but the convoluted invocations of the devil and the flashbacks to Pinky’s interactions with a kind outlaw philosopher named Revenge (Fernando Úsuga Higuíta) overcomplicate the film’s structure. Restrepo seemingly wants meaning to arise spontaneously from the juxtaposition of so many disparate elements, but more times than not they serve only to clutter up the rich psychic portrait painted by his images.

Los Conductos closes with a long shot of Pinky elatedly dancing in a military parade followed by a lengthy quotation from Arango’s poem “Elegy to ‘Revenge,’” which asks, “When will Colombia stop killing her sons and make their lives worth living again?” Rather than summing up the film’s thematic concerns, these closing moments mostly serve to muddle them even further. While Los Conductos is certainly preoccupied with issues of violence, the quotation simply feels like another tangent. The film provides ample evidence that Restrepo is certainly capable of whipping up entrancing visuals and staging a propulsive narrative, but as a translator of ideas into the language of cinema, he comes up frustratingly short.