Pablo Larraín made an international splash with No, a political drama that uses a grainy digital aesthetic to document the successful effort of unseating Augusto Pinochet from power. The dictator is mostly in the background of the film, whose attention is toward the “on-the-ground” effort to combine grassroots campaigns with advertising. In a sense, Larraín returns to his roots with El Conde, since it once again considers the waning days of Pinochet’s life. But in terms of approach and tone, the films could not be more different. El Conde is more like a horror film by way of Luis Buñuel, a provocateur who regularly satirized the corrupt and powerful. Its distant, borderline sterile point of view contributes to its success and is also a hindrance, creating a chilly distance between the viewer and subject.
The central conceit by Larraín and his co-screenwriter Guillermo Calderón is that Pinochet was a vampire. A prologue explains how he found eternal life right around the French Revolution, bouncing around the world to feast on the blood of the innocent, until he settled in Chile. Now an old man, Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) fakes his own death, and the action takes place in the immediate aftermath. His five middle-aged children, none of whom are vampires, are unsure how they will inherit his fortune, while his wife Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer) yearns to become one herself. Posing as an accountant, a vampire hunter nun named Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger) infiltrates the group in order to stop him once and for all. No one exactly gets what they want in this strange milieu, and the arrival of a wholly unexpected visitor throws a wrench in everyone’s pervasive greed – whether it’s for untold millions or eternal life.
El Conde’s icy effect is mostly due to the film’s formal qualities. Cinematographer Edward Lachman shoots in black-and-white, giving the film an inky look that is right for the material. When the camera moves, which is often, it glides through the space like a hunter stalking its prey. There are no moments of suspense, and the horror scenes are more surreal than gruesome. Sometimes there are callbacks to the history of cinematic vampires, like when Pinochet puts on a cape and literally flies through the cityscapes and casts a shadow that recalls Dracula. Still, Larraín’s notion of vampirism is not exactly traditional, as Pinochet’s preferred method of drinking blood is to put human hearts in a Vitamix blender, then drinking the bloody slurry. In all these scenes, Pinochet is an idea of pure evil, a pestilence who cannot stop nature, even when – after living for over 250 years – he has grown depressed and has a death wish.
A narrator helps imbue all this material with a dark sense of irony. Before there is any dialogue from an on-screen character, a woman’s voice explains the details of Pinochet’s early life, sort of like John Hurt in the Tom Tykwer film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The narrator’s nature begins as mystery because, well, she speaks English in a Spanish-language film, and has a snooty English accent. As the film continues, she is less omnipotent and more unreliable. She comments on the action, adding all kinds of judgmental commentary, until she feels compelled to leave her perch and literally become a character in the film. Her nature is one of the film’s many jokes, so it would be a mistake to reveal her identity, except to say it underscores Larraín’s notion of 20th-century politics. Horror is the only way he can make sense of it.
No doubt this film has added meaning to Larraín and Chilean audiences, who probably recognize references or jokes that can only come with living under the dictator’s regime. If that means audiences outside Chile miss all the details, then El Conde compensates through pure photographic beauty and his ability to draw from film history. This vampire is in conversation with other notions of this monster, not just the aforementioned Dracula, but also the hipster vampires from Only Lovers Left Alive and even the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. Another key reference is Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc because Luchsinger looks uncannily like Renée Jeanne Falconetti, who played Joan, and her purity becomes a punchline among those who cannot fathom the goodness in her heart. This languid approach to the material, whether it’s long periods of silence or a camera that shoots in medium takes or further away, offers plenty of time to consider what it all means and whether its aesthetic beauty clashes with its overarching message.
In other words, to watch El Conde is to experience the cinematic equivalent of reading a thoughtful essay, or “think piece.” There is a lot to think about, a kind of intellectual exercise that deliberately avoids emotions during its sinister provocation.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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