Time to add a new dot on this blog’s global cinematic coverage with a look at some Chilean cinema… although this isn’t necessarily all that new for this blog, or indeed for just the stuff I’ve seen outside of it. We’ve looked at director Pablo Larraín’s work on here twice before with the historical biopics Jackie and Spencer, and there’s some ‘6 Degrees To Kevin Bacon’ that can be played connecting this to the only other Chilean film I’ve seen in The Wolf House, an animated horror story set in the Colonia Dignidad, whose overlord, Paul Schäfer, has been publicly defended by conservative minister Hernán Larraín, Pablo’s father.
Not that I’m going to make any ‘apples and trees’ insinuations about Pablo himself based on that, although his latest film does deal in matters of bloodlines and legacies… just in a more Gothic way. He envisions the Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet (among whose many atrocities was the use of Colonia Dignidad as a torture camp) as a literal vampire, still mobile in the present day but deeply wishing he wasn’t. Not that the film goes into anything resembling pity for this creature though, either; Jaime Vadell really nails the decrepit villainy of the character.
Instead, Larraín and his co-writer Guillermo Calderón use some nifty alternate history world-building to paint the picture of Pinochet as a kind of nexus point for fascism and all things embedded as evil, with the film around him serving as an audit of his wicked deeds. Almost literally, seeing as a good chunk of the plot involves a forensic accountant (Paula Luchsinger’s Carmen) being hired by Pinochet’s children to sort through the many gnarled and twisted finances behind Pinochet’s blood-stained spoils of war. Said accountant also turns out to be actually be a nun who has actually been sent to kill Pinochet, and then there’s another twist about the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church, and y’know what, for as politically salient as this film can get, it ain’t half complicated.
But even for how much the general narrative structure (or seeming lack of one) did wear me down a bit, I did like how the film handled its sprawling web of political connections, with Pinochet at its centre. The man who “killed Communism” when he staged his military coup (a label which goes to explain why the United States, British, and even Australian governments secretly aided in said coup, because Western imperialism is a virus), whose pockets are being eyed hungrily by opportunists both within his circle (his family, his butler Fyodor, the mysterious narrator) and outside of it (the Catholic Church), and whose influence spreads from his hold over those in his government to the ideologies of governments worldwide. The central metaphor of fascism as this undying force that only exists to suck the lifeblood out of the populace is admittedly a bit basic, but credit to the filmmakers for fleshing it out this much.
There’s also the visual representation, with its black-and-white cinematography that pays tribute to older vampiric cinema like Nosferatu and even A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. As with Larraín’s previous films, I can’t say that it did wonders for me personally, but it serves as a decent visualisation for the moral tones of the story and it definitely adds a certain bleak atmosphere to the proceedings. But more specifically, it’s the flying scenes that really grabbed my interest here. Put simply, of all the films to take cues from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, I can’t say I was expecting this to be one of them. And indeed, with the shots of Pinochet taking flight, his cape billowing behind him, it’s difficult to consider any other reference point in use here. To say nothing of the ‘first flight’ moment for a character that Pinochet sires during the course of the narrative, which creates this perversely compelling depiction of that kind of authoritarian power. That kind of freedom, from the laws of Man, of God, of Nature, of basic friggin’ decency… there’s a reason why certain people are drawn to it.
Given its high-concept and high-key bonkers concept, I’ll admit that I wish this film’s entertainment value was a bit more consistent and a lot more immediate. It taps into similar statements about political power and corruption as films like The Death Of Stalin, but without the same engaging narrative structure or hit-to-miss ratio with its jokes, all of which are very below-the-radar here. But even with that said, I still have to give credit here for actually getting me to think about the throughlines connecting all of the political events and mentalities highlighted here, from the French Revolution, to Pinochet’s military dictatorship, to Western neoliberalism, to the roles of both church and state in the proliferation of fascism. There’s even a sense that Pablo Larraín was trying to sort through his own blood connections to this larger network, given his bootlicking father, and I am definitely a sucker for films that double as personal therapy for their creators (when done well, at least).
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