The Blue of The Sky (Juan Alfredo Uribe, 2012): Colombia

Reviewed by Angel Martinez. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Juan Alfredo Uribe’s first feature is a Colombian neo-noir that focuses on Camilo (Aldemar Correa) a young man who used to be in the military, but now resides with his divorced mother, younger brother, and sister. It’s been three years since he got out, but he hasn’t done anything with his life since. The world around him still revolves though, his mother is learning English, his sister and brother are going to school, and his dad works a taxi cab that he hopes to hand to Camilo one day. Still, Camilo is stuck and spends his days mostly playing soccer, his one true passion. One day, a soccer teammate offers him a mysterious job, and they go off to see someone called Tato. To his surprise, he finds himself in a kidnapping operation that has a professor of anthropology held captive, and his new job is to look after this man who seems to be deteriorating in health from being locked in a cell for so long. He bonds with the man as he tells Camilo stories about his daughter, the only person in his life after his wife died 15 years ago. Camilo years later, forms a relationship with Sol (Maria Gaviria), the professor’s daughter, but his past still haunts him.

This first feature carries many of the obvious conventions of a film-noir. The story itself recalls Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with the whole military veteran aspect. We see an ordinary guy, a loser, who gets into a situation too deep, and whose past doesn’t let him have any peace. The film carries the classic femme fatale character, his teammate’s lover/boss, who carries an aura of sex with her red lipstick and who controls the men around her. She flirts with Camilo while taking shots at him in a joking manner that he got his sister into prostitution and bought her breasts. The aesthetics scream film-noir as well, with the film taking place the majority of the time during the night, in a city, and with special lighting that gives it a dark expressionistic quality.

I went into this film because I love film-noirs. All the elements of film-noir are there, so why didn’t this film completely captivate me? Although this film carries a good frame work and ideas, its flaws ultimately lie in the execution of these ideas. A simple thing like the font which the film was presented revealed this to me from the very beginning. Whoever invented the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, I’d like to ask them “Why not?” as a part of a book’s aesthetics can still be a part of the book. The characters themselves at times felt to me more like caricatures of the film-noir genre than actual human beings and the acting at times felt too predictable and melodramatic. One of the biggest flaws that I saw with the film was in its soundtrack which over powered the screen with sensual like Miles Davis ballads, which the way it was arranged and edited made some scenes come off as completely cheesy.

After the film, the director came forth answering any questions that the audience had and revealed that this film was his response to a string of Colombian films in his country and that he wanted to show a different side of Colombia. I respect the fact that the director wanted to make something different, but to me, this movie didn’t really offer anything new or memorable, and I would argue that this film would probably carries much more similarities with the films he was rebelling from than he thought.