Los conductos (Camilo Restrepo, 2020) (Patreon)

Two films I've seen discussed a lot in recent months are also two films I've been pretty ambivalent about since seeing them upon release. Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, which was roundly condemned when it came out in 1995. And Isaac Julien's feature debut Young Soul Rebels was mildly appreciated, but mostly met with a shrug back in 1991. There are concrete reasons for the reappraisal, mostly having to do with the partial rejection of multicultural liberalism and the rise of Black-identified rebellion. Also, some viewers are making the connection between these decades-old Black British dispatches and Steve McQueen's recent triumph with the Small Axe series.

For me, these films politics were never much of a problem. I didn't much care for them mainly on the basis of form. Onwurah and Julien, both of whom established themselves with semi-experimental shorts, seemed to me to have lost the urgency and coherence of their best work -- The Body Beautiful and Looking For Langston, respectively -- when working in the narrative feature medium. A lot of experimentalists flounder when going full-length. (Joyce Wieland is another example. Her feature The Far Shore is by far her weakest film.

Pardon all the throat-clearing, but I am getting to the main point, which is that Colombian filmmaker Camilo Restrepo is someone who made two of the best short films of recent years, 2016's Cilaos and 2017's La bouche. Both were stylish, exacting, and driven by an intensive portraiture that placed their subjects in a concrete historical framework while at the same time embracing a highly evocative mode of abstraction. But his feature-length bow, Los conductos, doesn't really hold together all that well.

Clocking in at a slight 70 minutes, Los conductos ("Encounters") plays a bit like a bizarre mix of Robert Bresson and Kenneth Anger. While that may sound unfathomably awesome, in practice it's just odd. The film focuses on "Pinky" (Luis Felipe Lozano) who appears at times to be a gun-wielding criminal, and at other times to just be an itinerant laborer, making knock-off designer t-shirts and riding around on his motorcycle at night. Pinky exists more as a physical presence than a character, per se. His wild bushy mane and chin-tucked stare have a way of turning him into an emblem for undefined mischief.

Restrepo combines the saturated colors he used in the older shorts with a deliberate fragmentation of bodies and objects. We often see isolated hand gestures, or empty spaces defined by a stark light effect. A great deal of Los conductos is pitch black, occasionally with some hard-to-see movement in the frame. These images, which Restrepo captured on 16mm celluloid, evoke the nocturnal atmosphere of Pedro Costa, but Restrepo lacks the precision to coax legible images out of the darkness. (Not all inky surfaces are created cinematically equal. Contra Los Bravos, black is not necessarily black.)

At around the halfway point of the film, a second figure is introduced. Revenge (Fernando Úsaga Higuíta) is a dangerous loner who may have once been part of Pinky's gang. He and Pinky wax poetic about belonging and loss, and the plight of Colombia's young men who are wasted to senseless violence. At one point, Pinky appears to embody one member of a father-and-two-sons comedy team who, according to a spoken anecdote, used to go on national TV joking about the depth of potholes. Los conductos is so fluid with respect to coherent identity that I can't even be certain that actors and characters did, in fact, swap identities.

Los conductos is an intriguing object to be sure. But it strikes me as less a movie than an audiovisual sketch pad. With aimless night time motorcycle rides, a fixation of single lights intermittently piercing the darkness, and a herky-jerky sense of pacing, this is the sort of film that will garner strong champions. Its unwillingness to fully articulate itself will certainly prove evocative to some. But to me, it seems much more like Restrepo grappling with the problem of sustained cinematic meaning, and offering a tentative solution that plays like several short films awkwardly stitched together. It's obvious that Restrepo is a significant talent, but Los conductos never quite makes it off the mark.