La vendedora de rosas

La Vendedora de Rosas is a companion piece to Victor Gaviria's 1990 Rodrigo D:no futuro, about the lives of street boys from Medellin,Colombia. Vendedora focuses on girls equally affected by poverty, ignorance, abuse and neglect. It earns a place next to Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Hector Babenco's Pixote, excellent urban youth films in the tradition of Bunuel's Los Olvidados. Vendedora does not shy away from depicting the effects of drugs, violence, and family dysfunction while allowing for brief moments of tenderness and solidarity, even joy. Gaviria has enlisted street kids in enacting events from their daily lives, during 48 hours preceding Christmas. The film refuses to cheapen their plight with plot contrivances or stylistic flourishes. The spanish spoken is specific to the youth of Medellin, a welcome challenge to most native speakers. The fate of the characters evolves naturally from earlier scenes, without being predictable. I recommend La Vendedora de Rosas to anybody who considers film a window to the world of folks we wouldn't otherwise be able to access and an opportunity to understand it.

Some people in Colombia didn't like this movie because it shows the sad reality of the children in the streets, and because there are no professional actors playing the roles of these children but actually homeless kids. Make no mistake, this is a powerful film and no trained actor would touch your heart the way these kids do. The story is, of course, dark, violent and lacking a happy ending, but that's the kind of life the youth endures in the harsh Colombian streets.

From the original Edison shorts, through to Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, onto Italian Neo-realism and beyond, there has been a long-standing fascination with cinema's ability to represent reality. Naturally, special effects and highly-stylised cinematography have their place but the way in which cinema has been able to reveal and represent the finer details of everyday experience is something which has always enriched the artform.

La Vendedora de Rosas is an exponent of this quality. It films the barrios of Medellín, Colombia, in a manner which makes you feel as if you have experienced them directly. The film is, for the most part, completely non-judgemental, it merely gives us an extended glimpse of a reality which is likely very different to our own. It unflinchingly shows domestic violence, child-prostitution, street gang violence, juvenile delinquency, drug-taking and more. The camera is used as an open gaze: after each fight, verbal insult, or sexual advance made towards a minor, the film simply continues onto the next scene. The message clearly communicated is that what we are witnessing is simply normal life for the characters involved. They may be children but their lives are anything but innocent.

The film's value doesn't just lie in its verisimilitude, although it is worth noting that all of the actors were non-professionals and lived lives very similar to those represented in the film, it also strikes a chord because of how naturalistic and touching the central performances are, particularly Lady Tabares, who plays Mónica the eponymous rose seller. She is a young girl who left her family home seemingly due to not being able to come to terms with the death of her grandmother. Her grandmother appears to be the only person in her life who played a genuinely nurturing role and she is represented as a figure of angelic, redemptive quality in the short and subtle fantasy scenes which occur in the film and act as a departure from its generally more naturalistic style. The fact that Mónica feels that her life requires redemption tells us a great deal about her character: she is living the life that she feels forced to live, she has not chosen to enter a world of drug-taking and delinquency (who would?) she has fallen into it. Sadly, it seems very unlikely that she will be able to escape it.

The film does, unfortunately, verge on melodrama in the final act, which is a misjudgement in my view, but, for the most part, its unblinking representation of a world which offers constant threat and very little hope is one which is as eye-opening as it is stark. This is a film which, as much as any other, is able to capture the reality of the world that many inhabit. It's not just engaging cinema, it's a cultural and social education.

The movie does not show the whole country's way of living, but it shows the part some people would like to hide.

It is loaded with a lot of coursing and everything that could be considered as an unhealthy way of living, but in between all that descriptive stuff, it shows us the human side of those people.

One thing I liked a lot was the use of natural actors. The director and producer did the tough job of working with real life characters, so, everyone in the movie is just doing what he/she does in his regular life.

It tells us the story of Monica (a homeless teenage girl) who every day is fighting for her life in the scenario of an unsane capitalist world. It shows how her friends, who are mostly preteen prostitutes, muggers and hitmen are also human beings who deserve to live. Violence taking place everywhere, alcoholism, and drug addiction are just a small part of what living in the streets really means. Meanwhile, Monica takes care of Andrea, a cute little run away from home girl who is saved from many dangers because of Monica's astonishing maternal instinct.

As it is said by Seth in "City of Angels" : "Some things are real whether you believe in them or not".

The quote in the title is said by a child (one of Monica's friends) while he is inhaling some cheap glue with which homeless kids use to get high. It means : "Why should I want any shoes, if anyway I have no food?"

This is not a movie to entertain, it is meant to open the viewer's eyes to the "invisible" world of homeless children in Latin America. This is more a documentary than a film but the plot, based loosely on Han Christian Anderson's "The Match Stick Girl," is strong and compelling. Painful to watch at times, it is meant to be disturbing. Which is why I can say it I liked it and I recommend it, even though it haunted me and robbed me of sleep and I don't believe I will ever see it again.

These young people survive in the streets with no supervision and no one to provide for them, yet they are still going through the same tumultuous problems of the average teen; boyfriend-girlfriend troubles, gossip, friendship betrayal, and so on...and they cope with all their problems by sniffing glue. With the effects of the glue showing itself in these children one scene after the other it can seem to be too much as the plot begins to come together.

It is my understanding that the majority of the children were not actors but real street kids, and although the plot was scripted by the filmmaker the children were just being themselves, showing us a voyeuristic peek into their lives. And on a more disturbing note; none of these children have survived the street.

This incredible film is a must see for anyone interested in film as more than entertainment.