ColOZio
Playing 6.45pm tonight at Cinema Village: a fascinating Mexican film about three slackers who, on a acid trip, have a premonition of a political assassination. Buy tickets here. Read this essay by Joseph Oetjens, editorial assistant for the NPCC book.
“Ya llegó ColOZio a Rotterdam” captions the first of a series of celebratory Instagram posts chronicling the festival-hopping journey of ColOZio, second effort from Mexican director Artemio Narro. The attached photo introduces Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, politician, economist, and one-time presidential hopeful with the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico. He stands the same in each photo in the series: wide and casual smile, hand tucked into the pocket of his neatly pressed dress pants, one knee cocked
in a pose that conjures images of TV ads and meet-and-greets.
But this isn’t actually Colosio. No, the real Colo- sio was shot in the head in 1994 at a campaign rally in Tijuana. This is ColOZio all glossy and flat, a cardboard cutout reducing the man into only his television-prepped stance, schmoozing smile, and freshly shined shoes.
He’s the perfect mascot for a film with a political ideology so slight it threatens to disappear.
Gael and Diego, burnout stoners with dreams of making it big as artists, begin their odyssey by taking acid and staring at their TV. The TV tells them that Colosio will be assassinated in three days. With prurient images of heroism dancing through their heads, the fame-and-sex-seeking slackers upend their lives to prevent this tragedy, travelling cross-country and committing assault, kidnapping, and grand theft auto on the way.
“I don’t give a shit about Television,” Diego will later say. “I don’t give a shit about Colosio.” In a film about a political assassination the lack of political zeal in any of the characters is palpable, but not without a legitimate basis. Colosio’s killer, Mario Aburto Martínez, really is purported to have acted alone and offered no motive. The rising-star politician, whose campaign decried corruption and authoritarianism to the point that he was compared to the anarchistic Zapatistas, was ripped from existence without warning or explanation. And though the since-concocted web of conspiracy is thick enough to have spawned a feature film and two Netflix documentaries alleging involvement from then-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, there’re still no concrete answers to any of it. The film ultimately leaves us empty-handed, no matter how many dots we think we can connect along the way.
Perhaps the would-be junkie paladins of ColOZio see into the future in more ways than one. If an image of hope, as professed in the opening monologue of the film, can be spirited away by an untraceable phantom, why care about an intangible sphere governed by invisible logic? Instead, our heroes are driven inward, seeking to prevent Colosio’s death only for the personalsatisfaction promised, a transformative experi- ence offered on a silver platter, no ideological investment required.
In the end, the machinations that allowed for Colosio’s death are as invisible to us as they are to the characters when they arrive at the rally in Tijuana, held entirely off screen, and as incomprehensible as the grey CGI blobs that punctuate this journey of souls who don’t know how lost they are.