Chile '76

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.

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.

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.

IN A NUTSHELL: The studio explains that it's set during the early days of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Chile '76 builds from a quiet character study to a suspense, as it explores one woman's precarious flirtation with political engagement in her country. Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim) leads a sheltered upper-middle-class existence. She heads to her summer house in the off-season to supervise its renovation, while also performing local charitable works through her church. Her husband, children, and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation, bringing reminders of the world beyond. When the family priest asks her to take care of an injured young man he has been sheltering in secret, Carmen is inadvertently drawn into the world of the Chilean political opposition and must face real-world threats she is unprepared to handle, with potentially disastrous consequences for her and her entire family.

THINGS I LIKED: The leading actress, Aline Kuppenheim, is fantastic. I had never seen her in anything before. She does an excellent job navigating the subtle layers that take her into dangerous situations, as she chooses her levels of involvement and considers what consequences her actions might have on her loved ones.

The entire cast did a great job and felt like real people, not actors playing a role. Everything felt very authentic and believable.

The director selected some Interesting camera angles in various scenes to remind us of the different perspectives seen in Chile during that time.

It's always fascinating to spend time in another country. In this film, it's Chile. I love seeing what the houses and food look like. I have a nephew who lived in Chile for a couple of years, and I'd love to go there someday. Of course, the Chile represented in this movie is the 1976 Chile.

We get to spend some time at a lovely beach house. It's always been my dream to live right on the beach like that! When my kids were young, we used to rent a house on the beach for a week. Loved it!

The color palette is muted, which underscores the underground movement occurring in the country at the time.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: It's hard to understand what's going on at first. I hadn't read the movie's synopsis so that I could just walk into this "world" in Chile.

Some of the sound effects were interesting choices but also super annoying. I'm sure they were designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the leading lady was feeling with everything going on around her.

It's difficult to see what's happening in the nighttime scenes when the screen is so dark.

Some viewers will complain that nothing "happens." Not all audiences enjoy watching foreign films with subtitles.

Some viewers won't like the ambivalent ending.

For audiences unfamiliar with Chilean politics, it would have been helpful to see more newspaper headlines or TV announcers explaining the political climate of the day. It would have been interesting to read something on the end screen about what happened in Chile after the events we see in the film unfold.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: Smoking Alcohol A woman takes a lot of pills.

Someone gets seasick and throws up. Bleh.

We see a bloody wound up close.

Some profanity and a woman drops an F-bomb in Spanish.

!

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.