If a director includes a year in the title of their film, then they imbue it with heft. Such a gambit is a kind of promise, a suggestion that what the viewer is about to see is an authoritative account of the way things really were. The Sam Mendes WW1 epic 1917 was like that, and so was the recent legal drama Argentina 1985. In a deliberate reversal, the new political thriller Chile ‘76 – originally called 1976 in South America – opts for something more slight. Opaque and respectable to a fault, this is the kind of film that confuses obscurity with significance. It is one thing to keep the audience at a distance, while it is quite another to avoid any possibility of engagement.
Director Manuela Martelli, a former child actor making her directorial debut, opens with a mix of visual metaphor and ominous imagery. Her point of view character is Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a respectable grandmother who goes to her seaside winter home for repairs – alone, and ahead of her family. When we meet her, she is still in Santiago buying house paint, looking for a color that matches a travel book about Venice (a handy way to suggest her bourgeois sensibility). She hears commotion outside because someone has been arrested, although she tries not to pay attention, and later she sees an abandoned shoe near her car. It has been a few years since Pinochet seized power, and the film wordlessly suggests these unpleasant episodes are routine.
Once Carmen reaches her winter home, she becomes an accomplice to rebellion. It happens almost accidentally, in a way that eschews drama. A priest (Hugo Medina) asks whether Carmen will help an injured young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda) recuperate from his wounds. At first, she thinks this young man is a petty thief who stole out of pure necessity. But as he gets better, she learns his name is Elias, and he is part of the growing rebellion against the Pinochet government. She keeps this to herself, and begins a strange kind of double life. She is still a grandmother, and in her spare time performs little errands for Elias. Her sympathy for him grows, along with a sense of paranoia.
Küppenheim’s performance is right for the material. Sophisticated and taciturn, she is the kind of woman who thinks it is always better to be a silent observer, not a participant. While we get some sense of her interiority, usually through an incidental line reading or how she attempts to contain her fear, it is meager guide through the story. Martelli shoots the action at a considerable distance – using a thrumming electronic score as a poor substitute – that virtually everything important to the story happens off camera. Sometimes that is the right approach, like a scene where Carmen interacts with Pinochet sympathizers and can barely contain her disgust, although most of the time we are lost through countless insinuations and incidental conversations. By the time the end arrives, with Carmen making a confession about her culpability in yet another off-screen disaster, what should be devastating amounts to little more than a shrug.
It can be a mistake to depict totalitarianism head-on. Confrontation is not the way to suggest the full power of a regime, since its sneaky to ooze into everyday life is where the real control happens. More importantly, ordinary people find a way to live with it, a kind of survival that could also be interpreted as complicity. The recent Argentine thriller Azor understood that, with an amoral hero serving as a guide through corruption and state-sponsored killings. Chile ‘76 attempts something similar, and goes too far in the wrong direction. Maybe it is old-fashioned to think thrillers require more incident than what happens in this film, as it deliberately hides the story until there is no possibility for thrills, let alone resolution.
A little more cinematic “red meat” would have gone a long way, and instead we are left with a frightened woman who understands her terror way better than we do. Information imbalance like that is never the right way to build a thriller, since the opposite – where the viewer knows more than the hero – is the tried and true way to develop suspense.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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