By Leonardo Parrini
Stop, motherfucker, or you'll die now, damn it! With this unkind imprecation the murderers freelancerThey carry out their extermination work for a handful of dollars: the most miserable profession in the world is shamelessly exposed in the new film recently released by Ecuadorian cinema.
The Angel of the hitmen (Ecuador, 2013), is an action film about hitmen “for hitmen”, according to the confession of its own director and screenwriter Fernando Cedeño Marcillo; a Chonero, a promoter of that cinema that is made as an acolyte, with little money and under the budget that it is about a cause. Which one? Making the “realistic” cinema that people want to see, and making it as “guerrilla cinema”, of combat, without excuses of any kind.
The Angel of the hitmen, with an aesthetic of social realism sublimated by a solvent photography, gives an account of the culture of the hired killer that imposes violence for revenge and for money in Manabí, a province intense in itself, even in the subjugating features of the landscape. A corner of Ecuador where "The coffee is heated by a bullet and the stories are there, ready to be written. There are many people "of the real ones as they say" who tell me their stories, and due to the lack of support, these stories are easy to produce. I don't like boring movies, I like action, maybe it's like a personal style.", Cedeño said in an interview for the GiroNorteCine blog.
A straightforward film that does not indulge in moralizing, at least on screen, since its director does recognize that he is bringing the message that crime always pays and that if a hitman “becomes aware,” he will feel rewarded for producing a film made by hand, without the support of any institution. What is the message? In this case, the medium is the message: combat cinematography, not only for the action on the screen, but for the vocation of its managers. A team of professionals in training, brave people like their mountainous land, who spare no effort or abandon discipline until they achieve the final result: a film with good aesthetics, dynamic rhythm, with opportune pauses captured in symbolic images of the bucolic and exuberant surroundings of Manabí.
A fighting cast enters into action headed by the leading actor Javier Pico, supported by César Velásquez, Katherine Mendoza, Darwin Zambrano, Carlos Quinto Cedeño, Lenin Pilay, Fernando Cedeño, Elvis Flecher and Elizabeth Alvarado. In the staff directed by Fernando Cedeño, Iván Maestre stands out in the production, Carlos Quinto as assistant, Camilo Andrade V. in photography, cameras by Iván Maestre and Camilo Andrade and Jonathan Guines as focus puller of the story. Makers of "a new underground cinema", without great economic resources in the production and made invisible in the distribution by the institutions called to promote it. In exchange for this, the piracy has been responsible for making a business of its own and proliferating the copies that sell like hotcakes on the corners of the country's popular and child-friendly neighborhoods.
A story of revengeThe plot of The Angel of the hitmen tells the story of Angel, the only son of wealthy parents who are murdered one day for refusing to be blackmailed, so the protagonist decides to become the "angel of the hitmen", a subject willing to avenge the death of his family, no matter who gets in his way. As much as the film wants to sell us a popular vigilante, the leiv motive The film's theme is not justice, it's revenge; that ethical code of crime that settles its accounts with blood and fire, while corrupt justice looks on impassively as judges and lawyers set murderers free and the police arrive at the crime scene to count the dead, victims of contract killing.
We are not going to ask this film by Fernando Cedeño for moral messages or formulas. politically correct, since in its imperfection it has the sincerity to paint the country we have, violent and powerless against crime and willing to take justice into our own hands. Let false perceptions not prevent us from seeing the forest: this Manaba film has the nerve to reflect us in the social mirror as what we are and, at the same time, as what we can stop being. Except for some unnecessary explanatory scenes, the film is sustained by a constant tension that brings us closer to the outcome. Open endings work better in this type of film that seeks to keep the viewer hanging by a thread, because very structured endings, in addition to the risk of falling into stereotypes, may not please the majority.
The Angel of the hitmen is part of a cinema made by directors and actors, who have become soldiers who seek to make it possible, with fears faced and overcome along the way. Cinema made out of conviction and obsession, out of the passion to make a film that ends up being the testimony of people who feel responsible in the face of a historical process. In this sense, this combat cinema, bold in its efforts, introduces a camera into the marrow of the other country, one that builds itself with blood, sweat and tears, but buoyed by hope.
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