STORY OF A PLOT (AGENT RAMIREZ)

In The Posthumous Memoirs of Agent Ramirez, a soon-forgotten 1970s spy novel, the author Roberto Araujo satirises Colombia’s Security Service (D.A.S) and describes its violent repression of any left-wing movement during the Cold War. Four decades later, Manuel Hernandez, a friend of the author who died in 2006, lives in the building formerly used by the D.A.S., now converted into a residential block. This strange topographical coincidence is the inspiration for a film as quirky as it is mischievous. Historia de una trama begins as a performance of a literary adaptation: an actor playing Ramirez carries out the routine actions of a man coming out of the shower and getting dressed for work while a young woman in the secret agent’s bed reads aloud the corresponding passage in the novel. A few minutes later, the reader follows the actor to the character’s o ce, where they both find themselves sitting opposite Manuel Hernandez, ready to answer their questions about his writer friend and his little-known novel. From the salon to the garden, the interview continues its relaxed course as Hernandez proves to be an inexhaustible storyteller about his youth spent alongside Araujo, the son of a bourgeois family, torn between the interests of his class and the political aspirations of the literary circle he keeps company with. Snatches of conversation alternate with fragments of burlesque adaptation – with the ‘voice o ’ reading dubbing the dramatisation (on the real-life set) of Agent Ramirez’ futile attempts to infiltrate the student milieu. With its political use of irony, and narrative sophistication made lighter by a very controlled and never complacent casualness, from the writer to the film-maker, from one generation to the next, a precious legacy is passed on. (C.N.)Monica Restrepo