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Satanás
Satan / Satanás - Profile of a Killer
Colombia/Mexico 2007
produced by Rodrigo Guerrero, Ilan Arboleda (executive), Andres Calderon (executive), Jaime Osorio Gómez (executive) for Proyecto Tucan, Rio Negro
directed by Andrés Baiz
starring Damián Alcázar, Blas Jaramillo, Marcela Mar, Marcela Valencia, Isabel Gaona, Teresa Gutiérrez, Andrés Parra, Diego Vásquez, Vicky Hernández, Clara Samper, Patricia Castaneda, María Cecilia Sánchez, Hernán Méndez, Héctor García, Fabio Restrepo, Marcela Gallego, Inés Correa, Carlos Alberto Jiménez, Álvaro García, Carlos Gutiérrez, César Badillo, Gerónimo Basile, Javier Gardeazábal, Valentina Gómez, Fernando García, Didier van der Hove, Fanny Baena, Mauricio Fuentes, Lucas Jaramillo, Carolina Gaitan, Rodribo Trujillo, Ángela Pineda
screenplay by Andrés Baiz, based on the novel by Mario Mendoza, music by Angelo Milli
review by Mike Haberfelner
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A woman (Marcela Valencia) asks priest father Ernesto (Blas Jaramillo)
for advice because she can't feed her children anymore. He goes and buys
some food for the kids, but when he returns she has already killed them.
This and the fact that the woman later tries to seduce him when he visits
her in prison makes the priest rethink his vocation ... and ultimately, he
confesses his love to his assistant Irene (Isabel Gaona), quits
priesthood, and looks forward to a bright future with Irene at his side. Paola
(Marcela Mar) is a simple coffee vendor at the market, but two crooks
(Andrés Parra, Diego Vásquez) come to the conclusion that she is too
pretty to be just that, and they make her the bait in their plan to drug
and rob rich customers at a bar. This goes well for a while, but then
Paola gets into the wrong cab and the guys running the taxi rob and rape
her, just as if her sins came back to haunt her. Paola uses her contacts
to the crime world to have the guys executed, then though she quits her
job as bait and starts working as a waitress at a fancy restaurant. War
veteran and English tutor Eliseo (Damián Alcázar) has fallen in love
with one of his students, lovely Natalia (Martina García), but while
she's fond of him, she doesn't love him back and on top of that alreadey
has a boyfriend. This though is only the latest (and most hurtful) in a
long series of rejections Eliseo has experienced of late, but also the
last straw, because now he arms himself, goes over to Natalia's house to
kill her and her mother (Marcela Gallego), kills his own mother (Teresa
Gutiérrez) whom he still lives with and a bunch of neighbours. In the
finale, he pays a visit to the restaurant Paola is working at and Ernesto
and Irene are having their dinner to kill pretty much everyone in sight. If
world cinema was a genre, Satanás would have pinned the
formula down to the letter: Just tell a few stories that have nothing to
do with each other parallel to each other, throw in something about the
church with horror elements (Ernesto's story), a seedy crime story
preferably with a rape (Paola's story) and of course a reference to an
American filmmaker like Martin Scorsese (Eliseo's story is a very thinly
disguised retelling of Taxi Driver),
and to cover up the fact that this is actually an anthology movie, tie the
three films up in an ending that includes all the main characters, in the
form of a killing spree if you can't think of anything better. The
problem of Satanás though is not so much that it is formulaic as
can be, but that it remains terribly bland throughout, director Andrés
Baiz never manages to really involve the audinece with the characters and
their problems, sympathize with the characters even (and that's not the
actors' fault by the way). On top of that the three stories the film tells
are rather simplistic and lack any real depth, they are not all that well
interwoven with each other and don't really share motives that would
justify them to be in the same film, and the ending that is supposed to
tie them up and tie them together seems nothing but forced upon and is
almost a little pathetic. All that said, Satanás is not the
worst film ever brought to the screen, it's just disappointingly mediocre.
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