Lingering Darkness



The dictatorship that came to power in Chile via a coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet  on September 11, 1973 is probably one of the most known Latin American dictatorships, though sadly it was far from the only one. Its notoriety is not surprising, given that it was one of the most repressive, with tens of thousands of Chileans "disappeared," tortured and killed, and an estimated 200,000 forced into exile; it was also one of the longest lasting (1973 to 1990); and, what is more, one that had an impact on the military and economic policies in the region for many years to come.  What is surprising is that so few movies have been made about it.  No, the most recent film about the Chilean dictatorship joins a short list of feature films, to which No’s director, Pablo Larraín, has contributed three movies.

The first noteworthy feature film about the coup came rather quickly in 1975, Il pleut sur Santiago  (Rain Over Santiago), a French – Bulgarian drama by Chilean director Helvio Soto staring French greats  Jean Louis Trintignant, Annie Girardot, Bibi Andersson,  and more. The movie’s focus was on the events leading up to the election and overthrow of Salvador Allende, the socialist who became the President of Chile, and on the conspiracies that took place to bring about an end to his rule and his life.

Jean Louis Trintignant in Rain Over Santiago

 There was a Russian–Danish film Noch nad Chili (Night Over Chile), also by a Chilean director, Sebastian Alarcon, in 1977, which didn’t draw too much international attention; and then, in 1982 came Missing, to date probably the best film made about those first months of the dictatorship.

Missing was directed by Konstantinos Gavras, better known as Costa-Gavras, a truly great Greek director (Z, State of Siege, Amen). It presents the events through the narration of the real life story of Charles Horman, an American journalist who was one of the people disappeared by the dictatorship, presumably one of the 40,000 that were held in the Stadium in Santiago after the coup. The remarkable actor Jack Lemmon plays Ed Horman, a conservative businessman from New York who arrives in Santiago to seek out his missing son. Alongside Lemmon, the wonderful actor Sissy Spacek plays Beth, the missing journalist’s wife.

Jack Lemmon in Missing

 Missing won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Costa-Gavras, and Jack Lemmon won the Best Actor award. At the Academy Awards Costa-Gavras won the Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Oscar, and both Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek were nominated in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories.

Now there is Pablo Larraín’s No which has already also won the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival and was presented to compete in the Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards. No, however, lacks the emotional strength, powerful direction and acting of Missing, but it also lacks depth.

No presents Chile in 1988, when the dictator had been in power for 15 years, and revisits the moment in Chile’s history when 56 percent of the country voted “No” in a plebiscite to oust Pinochet from power.  The film’s focus is on the ad campaign that helped persuade Chileans to cast their ballots against Pinochet. The film uses archival footage and fictionalized characters, being an adaptation of a play written by Antonio Skarmeta, a Chilean novelist whose work was also the basis for the Italian movie Il Postino. Gael Garcia Bernal, the Mexican actor, plays the central character, the son of an exile and a modern ad man who gets persuaded to make TV commercials for the "No" campaign.

The film has been criticized in Chile for not including the broader context of the “No” campaign and the tremendous and massive grassroots effort to register 92 percent of the electorate, which is what made the electoral results possible.  This is no minor flaw. The film is overall well done and entertaining, with the archival footage (Betacam) blending in very well with the film, which was purposefully filmed using old video equipment. This makes the movie feel like the period it depicts (at least technically), but otherwise and because it does not consider the broader context, it doesn’t quite resonate as being real. It ends up lacking the complexity of this moment in Chile's history.  It was an oversight not to include all the effort displayed by thousands of Chileans to make voting possible so that the ad campaign could contribute to the success of the "No";  also not present in the film is the complex negotiation among the political parties that came together for the campaign –these party leaders are mostly portrayed as naïve and caricature-like folk with  old fashioned views in the movie. Why the director chose to go the simple route we'll probably never know, but it certainly detracts from the movie as a whole.



Gael Garcia Bernal as the modern ad man in No

In any case, it is still a movie worth seeing. No has become part of an unintentional trilogy by Pablo Larraín, in as much as it is one of three films that take place during the Pinochet dictatorship. Larrain’s debut film Tony Manero (2008), although dealing with a serial killer obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, takes place during the height of the dictatorship. Post Mortem (2010) takes place during the last days of President Allende’s presidency and is about an employee at a morgue’s recording office who falls for a dancer who disappears.  In all three films, the main characters feel that the political situation surrounding them is not going to affect them directly, but they end up immersed in the terror and repression of the dictatorship anyway.

Larraín has indirectly spoken to why he’s chosen to make films about this period in his country’s history.  Despite the time that has elapsed, the dictatorship is, for so many, a lingering darkness; in one of his interviews (NPR) Larraín states: "He [Pinochet] died without ever stepping in the courthouse, and [as] a millionaire. So it's quite sad, because we never really achieved justice. And most of the people who actually killed and tortured others in my country, they are still walking on the street. That is why this issue, the whole human-rights violation issue, is still ... an open wound."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wrong Brother

Unless you live in a big city that has many art house theatres, summer is a time of angst and waiting for cinephiles in smaller towns; waiting for the good, foreign movies to come out on DVD or waiting for the more serious fall movies from the studios to hit the theatres. Summer is the time when the movie industry makes money and rolls out the, for the most part, loud and uncreative blockbusters. For every Frances Ha there are ten action blockbusters like Star Trek, Fast and Furious, Man of Steel, White House Down, World War Z or The Lone Ranger.

I’ve skipped many of this summer’s blockbusters, but I feel motivated to write about one, albeit shortly, The Lone Ranger. It’s not that I believe this film qualifies as anything but an action blockbuster (an extremely expensive one at that), but because I’m rather baffled at how bad the reviews from the movie critics have been, how they have lapidated  this film more than any of the other ones mentioned above; in my opinion, unfairly so. 

Peter Traverse from Rolling Stone Magazine wrote: Unfortunately, this two-and-a-half hour obstacle course of cinematic horse turds resists redemption even from Depp. The Guardian’s said: The Lone Ranger staggers drunkenly from antic comedy to soulful solemnity to bloody horror without ever quite settling, or deciding what it is. And other critics are pretty much in the same tenor.  It could be the blockbuster phenomena per se, as Ethan Coen has said: Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

I love to see Johnny Depp, so I most certainly had The Lone Ranger on my "to see" list, even if it was directed and produced by the Pirates of the Caribbean series team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski.  I was not let down. I most certainly think Depp is worth seeing in this movie. He is compared to Buster Keaton by more than one review, and it's true he is funny in many scenes, but he's still incomparably Johnny Depp in make up, with his incredible facial expressions and eye language.

Overall, The Lone Ranger is a movie made to entertain, with no pretentions beyond that. It does, however, end up doing a little more than that and, I believe, it is thanks to Johnny Depp. In particular, the film finally flips the whole “cowboys & Indians” genre on its head, making this film, with a mostly preposterous script, actually more historically accurate than most others in this genre as it relates to what happened to Native Americans. As one of the reviews accurately stated, the Indians are the ones railroaded by the railroad. It is their land that is taken, their lives lost. And Tonto, who has been the lone ranger’s sidekick forever, is in this version the central narrator and character of the film, very well played by Johnny Depp, despite not having completely let go of the “me-Tonto-you-pale-face” stereotype.

In an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine (where, curiously, and very unlike Traverse, the writer calls the movie “impressively subversive, painting the United States Cavalry as the bad guys and the Comanche as the doomed heroes, with Arnie Hammer’s Lone Ranger essentially a sidekick to Tonto”), Johnny Depp says: “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations, they’re living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. But I wanted to be able to show these kids ‘F…that! You’re still warriors, man’”. Depp, by the way, has Native American blood, on his mother’s side.

Johnny Depp with members of the Comanche Nation

Too bad that this kind of action movie, the one that actually depicts an episode of the colossal discrimination/extermination suffered by Native Americans, is the kind that “flops” at the box office. Verbinski, in the same interview on The Lone Ranger, was hoping to do some more damage from the inside, in terms of shaking people up with respect to the plight of Native Americans, taking it to a summer blockbuster. I guess this is one reflection audiences in the United States don't really want to see.