With her Sundance debut, writer-director Gala del Sol announces herself as a fabulous off-kilter voice in contemporary cinema. By Manuel Betancourt. Drag queens and demons roam neon-lit bars with equal poise. Kung fu fights casually unfold in BDSM dens. In the global cultural imaginary, Colombia has long existed within two seemingly distinct though arguably complementary visions. On the other hand, buoyed by the possibilities of its natural beauty and the fantasies it could engender, the country has been synonymous with the promises of magical realism, offering such flights of fancy as necessary balms for understanding that very same violent history.
She uses them both as flints to create a flaming concoction. The spectre of death that so often dominates Colombian storytelling turns into a chance to create a dizzying film about the lengths a group of misfits will go to avoid their eventual encounter with Death herself.
She is at the heart of the labyrinthian plot that ends up involving a talking salamander, a dead poet, a budding drag queen, a kidnapped band leader, two star-crossed lovers, as well as a mysterious apothecary who spends his bartending shift at Babel as an unsuspecting observer as eager as we are to find out how and if!
The day we meet him is the day his contract with La Flaca is set to expire. Popular on Variety. All of those stories run parallel to the tender coming out story of the son of a preacher who moonlights as Darla Experiment Bayron Quintero , a fierce queen whose supportive drag mother and sisters may finally give him the nudge he needs to live in his truth.
Del Sol deftly shuttles between these various plot lines, letting their outlandish sensibilities run amok. The writer-director plays host here to the kind of ebullient, fabulous party that Babel plays backdrop on any given night, with her actors swaying in tandem to the many rhythms and genres she throws at them from scene to scene. The film insists on imagining a queerer, kinder world — not one that disavows the dangers and violence that lurk in every corner bigotry here emerges as the real villain of the piece , but instead finds beauty in resilience and joy in resistance.
