1976

Manuela Martelli has directed a wonderfully paced suspense film featuring a superb leading performance by Aline Küppenheim as Carmen, a chic upper class grandmother who gradually - and terrifyingly - perceives what's happening in her country. There is a touch of Hitchcock in the way it builds tension, aided by the powerful, intentionally intrusive score composed by Maria Portugal. For most films, this score would be too much. But here, the music mirrors Carmen's growing comprehension, not only of what is happening around her but also that her actions on behalf of someone fighting the regime have put her in peril.

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.

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.

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.

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.