1976

Aline Küppenheim turns in quite an impressive performance here as the middle class woman, married to a doctor, who finds herself embroiled in some clandestine activities at the height of the Pinochet administration in Chile. All she actually wants to do is get their beach house repainted, but when the local priest (Hugo Medina) approaches "Carmen" and asks her to take care of an injured young man, she finds herself exposed to quite a few dangers as she discovers "Elías" (Nicolás Sepúlveda) has a bullet hole in him and is on the run with the police looking for him. Over the next ninety minutes we get quite a sense of the peril in which she has to live; of her nervously sneaking about watching her own every move; telling lies and swapping buses when she travelled - all more akin to something from a John Le Carré novel rather than life in a supposedly civilised 1970s nation. What adds to the effectiveness of this drama is the fact that aside from some television actuality, we see little of the actual oppressiveness of the regime. It's the changes in her behaviour and her attitude to the young "Elías" that subtly embeds the sense of menace throughout the film. I didn't love the soundtrack and some might not like the inconclusiveness of the denouement, but I found that - like life in this turmoil-ridden country itself, made it all the more potent. Worth a watch.

Director Manuela Martelli quickly and nicely establishes that we are in Chile during the 1970s with news headlines from black and white tv's pointing to the country in turmoil. We meet a well-dressed Carmen who is planning to redecorate her family's summer house while her husband, a doctor, is away for work. When the local priest asks her to help care for a young man with a gun wound, she accepts without question, lies to get some antibiotics and gets in deeper over her head the longer she helps out. Aline Küppenheim gives a subtle performance for what evolves into a complex character that travels around in a world filled with paranoia. There's a theme with shoes throughout the film whether it's Carmen's expensive high heels splattered with paint or one found with a hole in its soul/sole that contrasts class differences. We know it's during the Pinochet regime and though the danger is rarely if seen at all, there's always a sense of mystery and fear surrounding everything. Carmen doesn't know who to trust or if anyone around her is secretly watching her. You could almost say that the tension is Hitchcockian since we've seen a variety of shoes and don't know exactly when the next one will drop.

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.

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.

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.