Sin Compasión

The second film by leading Peruvian director Francisco J Lombardi to find distribution in Britain is a typically committed adaptation of Crime and Punishment, which relocates the action to the streets of modern Lima. Here Raskolnikov is Ramón (Bertie), a gifted but arrogant philosophy student whose written work, declaiming the ability of a certain moral elect to discern a 'natural' justice that may defy conventional behaviour, understandably goes down badly with his lecturer; it does, however, supply an ethical framework for his decision, driven by the severest financial straits, to kill his landlady for her stash of rent money. With Ramón left to come to terms with the brutal axe murder, and police officer Portillo (Chiarella, terrific) swiftly on the trail of suspicion, the rest of the film portrays a society riddled with poverty and injustice. Lombardi's sometimes over-earnest drama wrestles with the big questions, but does so in a way that seems genuinely to germinate from a particular set of personal and social circumstances. The result is a dogged, but keenly felt and cumulatively thought-provoking piece. For all its flaws, the film burns with a humanity that firmly contradicts its title.