NERUDA (2016)

Pablo Larrain has picked up his pace lately. The Chilean director, who made his name globally with a trilogy of films set during the Pinochet era in his country, cranked out three features in 2015-16, including his Hollywood debut Jackie. For the home audience, the man who may already be Chile's greatest director took on arguably Chile's greatest writer, the 20th century poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda, however, is less the poet's life entire than an episode filmed with awareness of its own fictionalization. Neruda was a politician as well as a poet and, like many of his type in those days, a Communist, shown early proposing a toast to the Red Army for defeating fascism. As a Communist, Neruda (Luis Gnecco) was elected to the Chilean Senate, only to find himself outlawed during a crackdown on the left. The story of the film is his flight into French exile -- where he's idolized by the likes of Picasso -- involving various disguises and the help of a cross-section of Chilean culture. The added detail is his pursuit by an obsessed government agent (Gael Garcia Bernal), whose voiceover narration is no doubt instantly reminiscent of film noir even for non-American audiences.

Larrain apparently set himself a task for 2016 to rehabilitate the biopic. The genre has fallen into disdain, at least with American critics who decry the Academy's tendency to bestow Oscars on performances that seem mainly imitative over those that appear genuinely creative, e.g. Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything over Michael Keaton in Birdman in 2014. Ironically, an arguably worthy biopic performance by Natalie Portman in Larrain's Jackie was ignored in the rush to honor La La Land at the last awards. Neruda shares with the American film an emphasis on its subject's less iconic, perhaps less admirable side, which creates the impression that the actor is interpreting rather than imitating. The Neruda of the film is as much a self-indulgent sensualist, for a fat guy, as he is The People's Poet, someone whose utopian vision is more hedonist than Stalinist, despite his shameful partisan praise for the Soviet despot. This side of the hero gives his trek an almost mock-epic quality that is only augmented by the detective's mock-noir pursuit. It ends up being hard to think of Neruda as a hero, but that's the uncanny think about art, and his clearly inspired lots of people.

The mock-epic turns tragic when the detective dies in the snow during the chase, and Neruda reveals its true concern with who'll have the last word on history. Its own stance on Pablo Neruda will be problematic for some observers already because of Larrain's apparent indifference to the poet's opinion of Stalin. By putting anti-communist commentary in the noirish narrative of the doomed detective, Larrain and screenwriter Guillermo Calderon suggest that the anti-communist narrative of Neruda's career is not only fatally flawed but also generic, like noir, in the particularly limited sense of that word. Worse for the antagonist, he dies with something between fear and faith that Neruda will have the last word on his life, that he'll be remembered, if at all, as a supporting character in the poet's story, if not as a subject for his art. In a way, the fatal pursuit into the mountains is a metaphor for efforts presumably ongoing, in Chile and elsewhere, to define Neruda as a villain, or at least a fool, for his communist leanings. Neruda projects a confidence that the poet's art, if not the whole of his complex personality, will outlast the hunt.

ALLENDE (Allende en su laberinto, 2014) and THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-9)

 

Santiago, Chile: September 11, 1973 

 

La Moneda, the Chilean presidential residence in Santiago, is an Alamo of the Latin American left. President Salvador Allende made his last stand there against a military coup on September 11, 1973, as chronicled in Patricio Guzman's documentary and dramatized in Miguel Littin's 2014 movie. Guzman and Littin are near contemporaries, born a year apart, who both went into exile after the coup d'etat. Both are biased in Allende's favor, though neither The Battle of Chile nor Allende in his Labyrinth -- the latter borrows its title from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel about the death of Simon Bolivar -- is a hagiography of the socialist martyr. The fictional Allende played by Daniel Munoz seems testy and stubborn and prone to speaking of himself in the third person ("Allende does not surrender!") in his determination to be a martyr, while the real president documented by Guzman seems suicidally naive in his determination to carry out a socialist revolution against massive resistance without resort to force. Either way, there's pathos in the image of an aging academic in his sweater donning a combat helmet and firing a machine gun in futile resistance but epic courage.

Allende was the rare Marxist to win power by election, and wanted to prove that socialism could be achieved by peaceful means. Guzman's three-part documentary (I've only seen the two parts aired on TCM last week) is subtitled "the struggle of an unarmed people" and from all appearances the deck was stacked against Allende and his movement. Allende did not win a majority of the popular vote in 1970 -- he led the three-candidate field with approximately 36% -- and was chosen by the country's senate. But his fate was sealed almost from the start by the fact that his Popular Unity coalition never won control of the Chilean legislature. Conservatives and relative moderates could block many of his initiatives, but in turn they never had enough votes to impeach Allende. As Guzman stresses at every opportunity, the U.S. (under Nixon and Kissinger) opposed Allende from the beginning and provided both moral and material support to both the legal and the military opposition. The coup that toppled Allende was the second attempt of 1973, following a small but lethal uprising by a rogue unit that June. The first part of Guzman's documentary closes with ultimately dramatic footage of these soldiers firing directly at a cameraman as that brave man films his own murder. The anti-Allende majority in the legislature refused to declare a state of emergency after the coup, denying Allende the power to purge the military and other institutions, while many in Chile felt that Allende himself had far overstepped his constitutional bounds. The latter viewpoint is not taken seriously by Guzman and isn't addressed at all by Littin, and watching these films only launched me into a labyrinth of history without guiding me to the end.

The Littin film focuses exclusively on Allende's last day and presumes knowledge that only Chileans or specialist historians outside that country will possess. So I recorded the Battle episodes to get more context, and while Battle of Chile is a powerful piece of documentary propaganda it begged as many questions, if not more, as it answered. While I can't believe that a military coup or Allende's death -- the consensus is that the president killed himself as troops stormed the palace -- were justified, constitutional objections to his measures or his alleged refusal to abide by high-court rulings against him can't just be dismissed as the dishonest carping of conservative or bourgeois "mummies." Nor can I dismiss workers who went on strike in 1973 as stooges for the "mummies" as readily as Guzman does, no matter what damage they did to the Chilean economy and Allende's position. Guzman seems satisfied that Allende was always within the constitution because he was the duly elected president, and he refers to Allende's supporters as "constitutionalists," but Battle refuses to engage constitutional questions objectively. You could believe from Guzman, if not from Allende himself, that a constitutional election only provided a pretext for an extra-constitutional transformation of society. Allende deserves a fuller treatment of his character -- and may have gotten it in a 2004 documentary -- then either film gives him. Littin doesn't give us much sense of what he stood for other than occasional remarks about "comrades" and "workers." The main thing I got from Littin's film was that Allende chose death over exile to deny the coup plotters and the eventual dictatorship -- Augusto Pinochet was military chief of staff at this time and Littin shows Allende repeatedly asking where Pinochet is until he learns that the supposedly loyal general is leading the coup -- any pretense of legitimacy via a peaceful handover of power. In that sense Allende lost the battle of La Moneda but won the battle of history, at least on film. But while Battle is a fascinating film that also seems eerily prophetic of the polarization of the 21st century U.S. in its man-on-the-street interviews and clips from Crossfire-style TV shows, and Allende can't help but be dramatic, my real recommendation is that you find some reputable, nonpartisan book for the real story.

POST MORTEM (2010)

It took a while, but I've finally seen the middle film in Pablo Larrain's trilogy of films set during the rule of General Pinochet in Chile. Post Mortem was released between Tony Manero and No, but is the first film of the trilogy chronologically, set during the coup year of 1973. It's also the most classically composed of the three films, with impressive widescreen cinematography by Sergio Armstrong. Alfredo Castro, the star of Tony Manero, again takes center stage as a somewhat more sympathetically alienated character. Mario Cornejo is a civil servant, as he always carefully identifies himself. That lends a certain dignity to his actual work as a transcriptionist of autopsies. It's hard to tell whether the morgue is the ideal setting for such a drab creature or whether the work and the proximity to death is killing something inside him. Mario is a lonely man with a crush on a dancer in a burlesque show, Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers) who happens to live across the street from him. He makes it his mission -- apparently he has the run of the backstage area -- to save her career when she's threatened with dismissal for getting too thin, going so far as to threaten harm to the theater if the manager doesn't keep her. His threat is pathetic; he childishly knocks over a glass display and ends up giving the manger his own car in return for Nancy keeping her job. Nancy herself is seeing other men but her own neediness responds to his.

Meanwhile, politics is building to a crisis that is at first only a nuisance to Mario and Nancy as a labor rally blocks their car one day. Politics hovers over Nancy like a cloud, however, as activists meet in her apartment, though she seems indifferent. Mario's detachment is illustrated as he takes a morning shower while explosions and other sounds of mayhem erupt across the street. Eventually he strolls over to find Nancy's home destroyed and no one but a dog in sight. Work is unusually busy today as bodies are filling the halls of the hospital, to the growing dismay of Mario and the assistant coroner Sandra (Amparo Noguera) who's attracted to him but had been rebuffed before. Later, Sandra and Mario are summoned by men in uniform to perform a very special autopsy. This scene simply can't have the same effect on non-Chileans, but anyone with a sense of history may feel the impact when the corpse Sandra dissects is identified as Salvador Allende, the freely-elected Marxist president who has been overthrown by the coup. Sandra can't bring herself to finish the work and Mario is such a bundle of nerves that he can't type properly; he uses his unfamiliarity with electric typewriters as an excuse. Later they debate whether Allende killed himself, as the new authorities claim, or was killed, as Sandra suspects.

Mario discovers that Nancy has survived by hiding in a shed. She now depends on Mario to provide her with supplies while she stays in hiding. Meanwhile the bodies continue to pile up at the hospital, and not all of them are dead. Mario discovers a victim still breathing and begging for life, and he and Sandra manage to sneak the man into one of the medical wards for treatment.  It proves a temporary reprieve. In a climactic scene Mario finds Sandra standing at the top of a stairwell littered with bodies, screaming at a soldier. Apparently the goons have gathered up suspect hospital patients and killed them, including the man Mario and Sandra had saved. As Mario watches, immobile, at the bottom of the stairs, Sandra risks her life by admitting that she had rescued the man. Luckily, the soldier only fires into the air to intimidate her. For extra measure he fires superfluous bullets into some of the corpses.

A contrast clearly forms in Mario's mind between Sandra's death-defying heroism and Nancy's hiding. The contrast grows more stark when he learns that Nancy has shared her hiding place with a lover. Mario's response is shown in a single shot that closes the picture and begs some questions. The answers depend on what you think of Nancy -- whether she deserves, for whatever reason, what she seems to get or whether Mario's act is a misdirected act of resistance to the atrocities raging around him. It could be seen as an atrocity in its own right, or as Mario's repudiation of a past no longer sustainable. Larrain sustains the ambiguity by ending the story here. If we were to see how Mario was going to behave thereafter, his attitude toward Sandra or toward the new regime, we could more certainly attach meaning to his treatment of Nancy. But Post Mortem is really about the specific moment in September 1973 and is arguably meant to raise broader questions about Chileans' behavior at the time, for which each has his or her reasons. Larrain here seemed to be working his way out of the grotesquerie that marked (or marred) Tony Manero and is absent from No, in which Alfredo Castro is not the central character. Some grotesquerie is excusable, I suppose, when portraying a grotesque moment in history, and if the ending raises more questions than it can answer, they're questions worth asking. As a whole, Larrain's trilogy is an admirable set of films that establish the Chilean as potentially a major figure, if not one already, in the wild world of cinema.

On the Big Screen: NO (2012)

The Chilean director Pablo Larrain has made a loose trilogy of films dealing with his country's years under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Without having seen the middle film, 2010's Post Mortem, I'd suggest tentatively that the role of the media in Chile is an important subject of the series. The first film, Tony Manero, dealt with a man obsessed with Saturday Night Fever and getting on television. The latest, No, is a handheld epic about the 1988 referendum that marked the end of the Pinochet era, filmed in a deliberately ratty style as if it were a compilation of home movies (or video) of the time. The style seems appropriate for a film concerned with the power of television. Despite the particular place and time of the story, No has a strong thematic (if not ideological) resemblance to another 2012 release, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. The films have in common a mildly Machiavellian attitude toward politics that has offended some idealistic observers. As American audiences know, Lincoln focused on the shady means justified by the morally indisputable end of abolishing slavery in the U.S. Spielberg and Tony Kushner's moral could be summed up as: we don't have to convince you that we're right; we just need your votes. No arguably boils down to the same argument. Its protagonist is Raul Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), a onetime exile -- his father was politically active -- working in the advertising business as the story opens. He produces TV commercials and is approached by the Chilean opposition to consult their upcoming ad campaign. In response to international pressure, the Pinochet government has called a plebiscite to determine whether the general will stay in power. Many in the opposition are skeptical, assuming that the government will rig the results, but many also want to take advantage of the opportunity created by the allotment of 15 minutes of air time each night during the run-up to the vote. Since few expect to win (or be allowed to win) the vote, they want to use their nightly spots as a consciousness-raising exercise. They carry understandable grudges against the regime for its persecution of the left and dissidents in general. They think that calling people's attention to Pinochet's crimes is the most important thing. But Raul has a more radical idea: why not play to win?

The plebiscite is a simple yes-or-no vote, and Raul's idea is to make "No" an attractive product. His innovation is to bring the same techniques to political advertising he applies to commercial advertising. As a result, the No programs look much like the colorful, upbeat and utterly banal montage Raul put together as a soda commercial (the brand name is "Free") at the start of the picture. While the full-time politicians want to speak truth to power or lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive revolution, Raul insists on sticking with the core idea: No = Happiness. "Happiness is Coming" is the No slogan, illustrated with peppy music videos and skits, interlarded with the occasional pointed reminders of Pinochet's tyranny. Like something out of classic Hollywood, the No campaign catches on and the opposition now has a real chance to win. The regime goes on the defensive as Raul's boss from the ad agency turns the Si campaign from the original all-hail-great-leader extravaganza to response-attack ads against the No campaign. Meanwhile, the regime can't restrain itself from thuggery and starts an intimidation campaign against Raul, breaking into his house, defacing his car and threatening his son -- the mother, Raul's estranged wife, is an activist who's already taken some knocks herself. There's a nice irony to the story as Raul feels some pain of his own during the campaign after disparaging his clients' desire to vent their pain and rage in the No spots. And there's a healthy ambivalent note at the end when he finds himself unable to share fully in the opposition's joy when, against the odds, No wins the plebiscite. For Raul, it seems, the biggest consequence of his political intervention is how good it'll look on his résumé.

While Larrain and writer Pedro Peirano, adapting a play, clearly worked independently of Spielberg and Kushner, No and Lincoln are both concerned with the arts of persuasion in a democracy. The American film was clearly pushing against an allegedly idealist mentality that too often found itself out of options if it couldn't change the minds of opponents. The Chilean film, to me, seems less convinced of the correctness of its protagonist's approach than Lincoln is. The Spielberg film is a more triumphant vindication of cunning tactics while No is a constant struggle between the opposition's idealism and commitment to truth and Raul's seemingly-cynical approach; some downbeat material makes it into the programs over Raul's objections. There's a slight thematic echo of Tony Manero in Raul's determination to turn a historic moment into an ad campaign, to remake the world in the image of his cola commercial, even if in a good cause. And there's too much attention to Raul's lingering alienation -- like an overgrown child, he commutes by skateboard in tracking shots that belie the primitivist art direction -- for us to see the plebiscite as an unambiguous triumph of his tactics. Of course, like Lincoln, No has been criticized by idealists who prefer to see politics as the triumph of Ideas, or of The People, rather than a game of manipulating people, and the Chileans will be better judges of the facts that I can be. Neither film is as simplistic as critics portray them, and No is the more subtle, less cheerleading if not otherwise superior film of the two. It's the more interesting film visually because of the efforts by Larrain and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong to recreate 1988 in all its jittery color and the nearly-invisible art direction that makes the illusion work. Bernal isn't a barnstormer like Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role, but he makes Raul as compellingly complex a character as Day-Lewis's Lincoln -- only Bernal starts from scratch. No and Lincoln really would make a great international double-feature. Each may be a historical film, but their real historical value may be as documents of the dilemmas of liberalism in 2012.

Here's the original No campaign music video as uploaded to YouTube by kntayal.

TONY MANERO (2008): The Disco Duck of Death

Chile in the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship is a desolate land. Dissidents are still being rounded up on the streets, while the common people seek hours of escape on television in the form of Festival, a sabadogigantic variety program with game-show elements and the cheery slogan, "A little money is better than none." One of its gimmicks is a weekly celebrity-impersonation contest in which the audience picks the Chilean counterpart of some famous foreigner. One week, it's the Chilean Chuck Norris; the next, it might be Julio Iglesias. But in the week we're interested in, Festival is looking for the Chilean Tony Manero, a native incarnation of the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

One Manero-wannabe is Raul Peralta Paredes O, who at age 52 is perhaps the most unlikely candidate. His case seems the more hopeless when he shows up at the TV studio a week ahead of time. He gets to register for the Manero contest, at least, and when asked his occupation he simply says "This," meaning "show business." He does a Manero impersonation and serves as a sort of director of a Fever-inspired floor show at a local bar with bigger aspirations. In his free time he watches the movie obsessively, memorizing Travolta's English dialogue during the Spanish-subtitled film, and he dreams of installing a glass dance floor like that in the movie in the bar. As far as his Manero mannerisms go, the spirit is willing, but the legs are weak. But he has no higher ambition than to become Tony Manero -- though he does have some lower ambitions.

Idol and idolator: Alfredo Castro (below) looks up to John Travolta (above) in Tony Manero.

So far, so Scorsesean. Raul is one of those obsessive, monomaniacal losers who manage to make big breaks for themselves in moments of insane inspiration or pure violent passion. But director Pablo Larrain and his co-writers take the Scorsese formula to a fresh extreme. In Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy there's a slow burn before the madman's desperate outburst. In Tony Manero it's established early that Raul is a madman and a murderer. We see him witness a mugging from his window and rush downstairs to aid the victim. He helps her home and notices her color TV set, while she offers him some expired cat food as a reward. Then he beats her to death with his bare hands.

He'll later trade the TV to pay a shady junkman for the increasingly expensive glass tiles he'll need for his dance floor. Everything is a means to the end of his hoped-for transfiguration into Tony Manero. Saturday Night Fever becomes a religious experience for him, if not something more pleasurable. Raul may be having some midlife crisis of sexuality that he doesn't comprehend. His girlfriend complains that he can't get it up anymore, except when he thinks of his new dance floor. He's traumatized when Fever is replaced at the local bijou with another film starring "the same gentleman," called Brilliantina. It just isn't the same. In his grief he sneaks into the projection booth and beats the projectionist and manager to death. He then finds the precious reels of Saturday Night Fever and takes them home to inspect frame-by-frame.

You should be dancin'. Yeah.

You get the idea by now. There might be some suspense over whether Raul will be caught before the Festival show, except that Larrain establishes fairly early that law enforcement is more interested in tracking down dissidents than in catching real criminals. You get no sense that anyone's even aware of a murder spree going on. The only pressing questions are whether Raul will win the Manero contest and how many more people he'll have to destroy before then.

There's no point in analyzing why Raul responds to Saturday Night Fever the way he does. You either accept that he's barking mad or that his situation is somehow symbolic of Chile's plight under Pinochet. There's nothing wrong with a film about a madman, of course, and as Raul co-writer Alfredo Castro convincingly portrays a person who isn't flamboyantly or whimsically mad but selfishly compulsive to the point of complete ruthlessness. Larrain finds the right milieu for him in the drab, seedy locations, and contrasts those effectively with the tacky fantasia of the Festival studio set. I think Larrain's intent is ultimately satiric; otherwise he might have made the killings more gory and the film itself more of a horror movie. It's horrific enough as is, as a portrait of the kind of monsters a society like Pinochet's Chile might create.

Here's an English-subtitled trailer, uploaded to YouTube by NetworkReleasing.