1976

The film is a stunning portrayal of the inherent, ubiquitous vein of violence in a country experiencing oppression - how it is built into strata of fear and a collusive silence, where everyone has to play a role, rather than be authentic. Every little detail is a description of this experience, a metaphor or picture of how the venom of a violence-based power removes legitimacy from not just government but from the structure of society, even the family itself. The camera work and art direction are exquisite, as is the haunting score and the beautiful costumes. The writing too, elliptical and shorthand helps you grasp the social meanings without ever being heavy-handed. At the end, you feel you can barely breathe from all the tension - much like it must feel to live in a police state.

What should have been a tense, claustrophobic look at life in 1976 Chile shortly after the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende administration and the imposition of the hard-line Pinochet regime is, unfortunately, a watered-down, meandering, unfocused tale that never fully attains its goal. Writer-director Manuela Martelli's story of a middle-aged doctor's wife who risks her own safety to care for a wounded insurgent in hiding never really catches traction, filling its narrative with endless, unexplained, underdeveloped plot incidents and a woeful lack of character development, including that of the protagonist, whose motivations are never adequately explained but merely hinted at with such subtlety as to be virtually meaningless. By the time viewers reach the film's end, they're more left with an unsatisfying "Oh" rather than a throat-clutching "a ha!" A true disappointment given the subject matter this production had to work with.

Great story with an equally mysterious plot. Carmen visits her house by the big blue to get off of regular life and picks a red paint for walls then tame it with hints of blue. She freezes at screams and her husband gets upset when resistance is called out by a friend in the presence of Carmen. A great story that shows how sacrifices opens the eyes of a sleepwalking masses. Excellent colour tone in visuals and great cinematography capturing expressions well. Unique use of sound effects signaling the tensions kept restrained breaking free. It's a great look at how life was from the outside of recent revolution how social views changed and should change. Excellent.

This is a very fine film indeed; perfectly paced, it slowly builds in tension in a subtle, understated, but very real way. Great acting from Aline Küppenheim who steps outside her comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and whose eyes are slowly opened to another country. You watch - there's no need for any overblown scripted dialogue. Some others may think there's too much unexplained - I didn't feel that at all. In a world where there's a necessary conspiracy of silence you become an accomplice in the need to keep quiet. Even her stop in a roadside cafe radiates suspicion and fear. The music is just spot on - at times riffing on 70s cop thrillers and then at times discordantly modern. And the final scenes - without giving anything away: a punch in the stomach and an utterly nauseous aftermath.

This movie features an excessive amount of of little scenes that hint at, or foreshadow, something sinister, but that are never referenced again later on. They open a "plot thread" in the viewer's mind (e.g. "this person is suspicious", but since that person will never appear again to confirm or refute the viewer's initial hypothesis, the loose thread is never tied). It's the accumulation of these that makes for a frustrating experience by the end. It's as if the director expected the viewer to have forgotten most of those little occurrences by the end... shame on the director for underestimating the audience.

The protagonist's motives are never really explained and her personality is barely showcased, making for a flat main character that the viewer doesn't really empathize with. She comes across as just a generic, blasé, and cold rich woman that does the things she does because... reasons.

The scenes sometimes feel poorly connected to each other, with sudden jumps in time that skip over important things that (presumably) happened, but which are never shown, leaving the viewers to have to fill the gaps themselves. "Discontinuous" is perhaps the word I'm looking for.

A decidedly disappointing experience.