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  • La Vendedora de Rosas (The Rose Seller) and Ratas, Ratones, Rateros (Rodents)
  • J. Anthony Abbott

Two movies, La Vendedora de Rosas (the Rose Seller) directed by Víctor Gaviria and Ratas, Ratones, Rateros (Rodents) directed by Sebastián Cordero, challenge viewers to deal with the realities of life among urban teenagers in the northern Andes. Both released in the late 1990s, these pop films portray the uncertain moral and social environment that young adults and children face while negotiating relationships among family and friends. As with much of the world's contemporary, popular, cinema, prevalent themes in these two films are drug addiction, larceny, and off-hand brutality. However, the films of Gaviria and Cordero are more complex than their Hollywood counterparts in that good-guy/bad-guy dualisms do not dominate the film plots; both films primarily follow the struggles of the leading characters as they seek meaning in their morally questionable lives.

La Vendedora de Rosas, nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, unfolds as the thirteen-year-old Moníca (Leidy Tabares) agrees to show eleven-year-old Andrea (Mileider Gil) how to sell roses to night clubbers in Mendellín, Colombia. As with many of the other characters the film portrays, Moníca and Andrea are runaway girls who spend most of their time on the street. These are youngsters in terms of their biological age, their interests, and social interactions. Yet they find themselves with the adult responsibilities of securing food and shelter while keeping themselves safe on city streets. Addled by alcohol, marijuana, and glue, they also struggle to establish and maintain secure, meaningful relationships with friends and family. These multidimensional characters serve to challenge many tropes regarding the experience, motivations, and maturity of children and teenagers.

The primary characters in La Vendedora de Rosas are all children. They find joy in the childish gifts, like a candy, a valentine card and a children's watch. Emotional discussions are based on romantic relationships that are weeks old, and their plans for the future demonstrate an incomplete grasp of the resources necessary to achieve the wealth [End Page 133] and security of higher social classes. On many occasions the young female characters return to the homes of their parents searching for the protection only afforded by a patriarch or matriarch.

Adult situations and responsibilities cement the relationships among the young protagonists. The girls rely upon one another for shelter by sharing a room and beds in a low-rent rooming house. For protection they travel in groups or pairs, even as they compete to sell their flowers to the same group of customers. The young girls even enlist the help of boys for protection when Andrea is accosted by a potential rapist, and incident in which a bicycle chase ends with the murder of a homeless man in a case of mistaken identity.

Their numerous strategies for building relationships may shock the viewer, given the casualness with which girls engage in activities that many would find loathsome. Children less than sixteen years old share alcohol and marijuana throughout the film. Moníca returns to her estranged family's home periodically to steal. Another young girl, Claudia (Liliana Giraldo), considers prostitution to be the basis for a good romantic partnership as she prevaricates over the manner in which she will have remunerated sex with her so-called boyfriend. In their attempts to secure a male partner (the term boyfriend seems too affectionate to describe the relationship) two girls squabble and fight. When feeling low, the girls find comfort in sharing glue bottles with each other or with boys.

The questionable actions of these girls are not driven by their immorality, but seem to be the result of their troubled lives at home. Little Andrea, perhaps ten or eleven years old, has left her mother's home to avoid physical discipline. She returns home periodically to negotiate the relationship deciding to stay after her mother agrees to refrain from striking her. Moníca occasionally returns to her mother's home while high on glue to commune with her dead grandmother, the only member of her family with who she can identify, hoping to find comfort in...

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