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Rosario Tijeras. Dir. Emilie Maillé. México-Colombia-Espafla-Argentina, 2005. Dur. 126 min.
Readers of Jorge Franco Ramos' 1999 bestseller Rosario Tijeras will be interested to see how this love story, set against the backdrop of the narco violence in Colombia in the 1980s, unfolds on the big screen. As with any other cinematic interpretation of a novel, this one somewhat distances itself from the text, while attempting to preserve the novel's main focus on a lyrical love story that involves a beautiful and violent sicaria, an adolescent female assassin for hire. The plot is non-linear, jumping back and forth between scenes from the past, including Rosario's transformation from a poor but superbly attractive girl from the shantytowns of Medellin into a sophisticated killer who murders and seduces with the same ease. The film begins exactly where Franco's novel does: Antonio, Rosario's confidant who has secretly loved her all along, rushes the bullet-ridden Rosario into an emergency room. While doctors operate on her for hours, Antonio-his white shirt smeared in blood-sits in a waiting room in front of a broken clock, reminiscing about how he and Emilio, Rosario's eventual lover, met her in a trendy discotheque, how their relationship evolved, and how it changed their lives forever to finally break them all apart. Antonio's memories serve as a common thread, allowing us to experience the entire story first hand. Occasionally, the story returns to the emergency room, thus stressing Rosario's fleeting existence and her critical condition.
Rosario, who comes from a broken and violent home, and who has matured while living on the edge surrounded by drug lords and thugs from her neighborhood, contrasts greatly with her sheltered childhood friends from the affluent class, Antonio and Emilio (played respectively by Unax Ugalda...