Already with her short films, Gala del Sol was showcasing a steadily growing knack for the imaginary. Her very first, Sekhem (2016), explores a sculptor’s creative process, The Sandman (2017) literally delves into sleep and dreams, while her most well-travelled short, Transient Passengers (2018), is an experimental psychological journey through the memory of a time-obsessed office clerk. In Rains Over Babel [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] – which had its world premiere at Sundance and is currently locking horns in the International Competition of the Transilvania International Film Festival – del Sol more explicitly embraces magical realism, established as a Latin American “brand”. Describing her style as “retro-futuristic tropical punk”, although the punk is more glitter than grit and the futurism is still in embryo, she has actually created a more performative work than a cinematic one, loosely related to Dante’s Inferno, while building the plot more on gimmicks than on solid storytelling. Having partaken in theatre since the age of four, she gathered a group of young actors who initially started working together just for fun, with no idea that it would one day lead to a film. The result is thus flashy but diffuse, and messier than can reasonably be tolerated for the almost two hours of running time.

Set in a psychedelic version of Cali – del Sol’s native Colombian town – the film follows an array of outcasts who gather at Babel, a dive bar that doubles as a purgatorial limbo. There, they wager years of their lives in high-stakes games with La Flaca (Saray Rebelledo), the eerie local embodiment of Death. After an alluring opening that introduces the narrator and the bartender Boticario’s wife, Erato (Sofia Buenaventura), as the muse of the story about to unfold, Boticario himself (Santiago Pineda Prado) guides us through a labyrinth of small plots, characters and the gambling tricks they use against La Flaca. The protagonist in this chaotic fable appears to be Dante (Felipe Aguilar Rodriguez), who must settle his affairs with her before the expiration date of their pact, and who is surrounded by a constellation of supporting characters: poet Roma, who sells drugs to make ends meet, and his flatmate Monet, rushing to recover his body from Hell before it decomposes; a pastor scandalised by the queer spirit in town, and his son, who dreams of marrying a trans woman while preparing a coming-out drag show; and a mother trying to claw back some extra years of life for her daughter, with a salamander as her life coach – to name but a few. It’s the good old game of bargaining with Death, tackled in classics like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, but here, any possible philosophical interpretation is stifled by the overwhelming rush of events, with the “message” remaining more or less the same even if most of them hadn’t happened.

The genre mix of action, dramedy and fantasy along with the glut of cultural references (from Greek mythology, through Renaissance literature, to a literal visual citation of Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels towards the end) are sometimes consciously thought-through, other times not so much, but largely do not serve a significant purpose. Whether out of an ambition to showcase erudition or to offer a bit of everything for everyone, without forgetting the exotic element that always sells – such as salsa, seductive imagery and general exuberance – the film is overloaded with details that are not hard to navigate, but which do quickly become tiresome. The louder and flashier a spectacle is, the faster it wears thin if there’s no substance beneath the surface.

Rains over Babel is a co-production between Spain's Fabrica Mundi LLC and Colombia's Gala del Sol Films.