>>REVIEW
GUERRILLA GIRL
DIRECTED BY Frank Piasecki Poulsen
Monday, May 15
Engineered Air Theatre (Movies that Matter)
Isabel, a pretty 21-year-old university student, has decided to leave her middle class family and her studies in order to join a covert team of armed Marxist revolutionaries in her native Colombia. A film crew gets permission to videotape the resulting documentary and Guerrilla Girl proves to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that it tells us very little about the organization that Isabel chooses to join.
Isabel comes across as a sweet, somewhat pampered big-city girl who is unprepared for life in the jungle – in fact, our first glimpse of her, just before the title appears onscreen, shows her slipping and falling while making her way to the training compound. Later on, her squeamishness, her relaxed attitude towards taking orders and her inability to take a bath in less than 20 minutes causes headaches for her new comrades. The instructors seem to be giving her a lot of leeway, probably because they want to establish the educated lass as a role model, and also to make the finished film more attractive to new recruits. The result looks more like summer camp than boot camp.
The FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) welcomes Isabel into the fold, and asks her to outline some of the bad things she’s heard about the organization. Then they chuckle and assure her that none of the nasty rumours are true. They also attempt to justify the group’s notorious ransom kidnappings as simply a means of "taxing" the populace in order to finance Colombia’s future Communist government.
Isabel says that she’s "thought long and hard" about her lifelong commitment to the FARC, but then she blanches when a fellow recruit points out that they might be expected to kill people in armed conflict, confessing that the possibility hadn’t occurred to her (perhaps her decision was a little more rushed than she’d like to admit). Still, this works in the movie’s favour, as Isabel belatedly pops a few ethical questions that are much more interesting than the answers she receives from her FARC superiors, which simply restate the group’s aims and ideology over and over again.
The film ends abruptly with the completion of Isabel’s basic training, denying us the juicy parts of what is obviously a much bigger story. This is, after all, a mere 90 minutes out of her training, which is only three months out of her permanent FARC membership, which is a fraction of FARC’s 40-year existence, which is just a drop in the well of Colombia’s turbulent history. If you read up on the subject, you’ll be able to have a fascinating post-film discussion on all the important stuff that was left out. |
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