2023-09-07 13:27:20
The Count 7 points
Chile, 2023
Directed by: Pablo Larrain
Screenplay: Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larraín
Duration: 110 minutes
Performers: Jaime Vadell, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Gloria Münchmeyer, Catalina Guerra, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, Marcial Tagle.
Premiere: Available in theaters.
September 11 is a date on which history seems to have stubbornly accumulated infamy. The last, 22 years ago, was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. But there is another fact, of which the 50th anniversary is commemorated this Monday, which is especially significant for Latin Americans. It is about the coup against Salvador Allende, president of Chile until 1973, who was assassinated in the Palacio de La Moneda. Both acts were perpetrated under the command of the head of the Chilean army, General Augusto Pinochet, who immediately assumed the presidency of the country and remained in power officially until 1990 (and beyond).
Just as Justice found him elusive, the figure of Pinochet is also uncomfortable for Chilean cinema, in the same way that vernacular dictators are for Argentine cinema. This difficulty in dealing with characters who, far from being the object of a firm and unanimous rejection by the entire social structure, still have someone to vindicate them on both sides of the mountain range, makes the premiere of El Conde, a new work by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, turns out to be an unexpected object. Even uncomfortable, as it puts viewers on a new and unknown path: that of portraying those responsible for collective tragedies of this magnitude, no longer from “serious” genres, such as drama or documentary, but through other genres. rather “profane”, such as black comedy and terror.
That is what El Conde is about, who imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire who fakes his own death to be left alone. That is the particular starting point that the film proposes to approach the story, using resources such as the absurd or gore (graphic and stark representation of physical violence). In these ways, it is also proposed to record different facts that allow the effects of that dictatorship to remain present (or “alive”, to put it in vampiric terms) today.
In this sense, it can be agreed that the archetype of the vampire applied to the figure of a dictator like Pinochet, responsible for a regime that literally drained the blood of his country, not only in political and social matters, but also economically, is appropriate, but also obvious. So much so that as an allegory it ends up being more prosaic than poetic. It is impossible to know if that was Larraín’s intention, although the aesthetic proposal of El Conde, filmed in impeccable black and white and with extraordinary photography, accounts for a poetic search with several successes. However, the fact that the metaphor itself ends up being a little (or very) thick, ends up working very well with the satirical mode, the black humor and the harsh mocking tone with which the director portrays his characters. .
It is not the first time that Larraín has approached the dictatorship of his country with his cinema. He did it, for example, in Tony Manero (2008) or in NO (2012), where the “serious” intention did not always play in favor of stories that ended up being somewhat reductionist. On the other hand, in El Conde the crude game of turning the dictator, his wife and his children into an atrocious display of phenomena allows black humor to reach good moments. In this way, the film can also be a bit “tribune”, abusing the resource of aggressively approaching its characters, almost as if it were a public stoning. It is true that here Larraín tries again to portray Pinochet as the pure incarnation of evil. But also, perhaps for the first time in his filmography, he carries out the operation of expanding the circle of responsibilities beyond the dictator, who in the end was nothing more than the executing hand at the service of powers that, until now, remain hidden behind your back.
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