Pinochet is not dead, but he is a 250-year-old vampire who lives hidden in a ruined estate on the frozen southern tip of South America and flies to Santiago at night to feed his bloodlust. It seems to be the starting point for a B-style movie. Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter and yet it is so El Conde (from September 15th on Netflix), a new, crazy and luxurious film by one of the few true authors of our time: Pablo Larrain. Who, besides what is, perhaps, the best living director of “women” (see. Spencer and even more, Jackie; waiting for my callas starring Angelina Jolie) and after making a trilogy dedicated to this ferocious and barbaric regime (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No – Rainbow Days), now points directly to the jugular vein (pardon) of the generalissimo. Pinochet died free, unpunished and a millionaire. And this impunity made him eternal,” says Larrain. This is the heart of the film (and you will see hearts, believe me, even in smoothies like milkshakes).
Jaime Wadell (Pinochet). Photo: Netflix
New biopic (?), it’s even bigger Sui generis (and a genre) that was born from a photograph of Pinochet in a cape: “For years I imagined him as a vampire, a creature that never ceases to circulate in history, in our imagination, in our nightmares,” the director recalls. “And then, during the pandemic, I was on the phone with Guillermo Calderon (former co-writer Neruda), we had a lot of free time to talk and talk, like most people at the time. Then I called Jamie Wadell, the main character, and Netflix showed interest in producing him. But it’s been a long journey, maybe for me it’s the journey of a lifetime.”
Pablo Larrain on the set of El Conde. Photo: Diego Araya Corvalan/Netflix
“Never again– thundered last year directly from Lido Santiago Mitra with Argentina, 1985 about the prosecutors who persecuted the perpetrators in the most terrible period of this military dictatorship. “Even in Uruguay, they managed to plant them on time. And that creates a sense of justice, the idea that something like this shouldn’t happen again. However, for us Chileans, this “never again” does not exist. And that kept Pinochet alive because people supported his legacy and what he did. That’s why we’re still broken.”
Parts that for the first time in such a direct way Cinema (and what else) is trying to put together. “Pinochet has never been filmed before, no one has ever put a camera in front of him. And here another age-old question opens up, on which everyone in my country has a different opinion: is it too early? Or is it too late? I wanted to do it, and there was only one way: to use the tools of satire – Stanley Kubrick already figured this out with Dr. Strangelove, taken just 20 years after World War II – so as not to arouse sympathy. It would be very dangerous.”
Is there a risk that history – this history – will repeat itself? According to Marx, it is always repeated twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. Well, Larraine wrote us a movie that we didn’t even know existed: tragic and grotesque at the same time, dark, but at the same time funny, catchy and lyrical. And, of course, so allegorically that one can go around and be very direct: “I believe and hope that this can resonate in our modern times. What happened in Chile obviously has its own characteristics, but I see how this wind is pulling to many parts of the world. The urgent need for national catharsis, which finds an unsettling counterpart in one bad atmosphere global: “Evil is not just a German guy who screams with a swastika on his arm, fascism can take many forms, often even hidden and hard to read: it starts with seduction, then turns into fear and ends in violence. This is something we are seeing in many countries with the rise of the right, and we need to be aware of it.” El Conde Want to issue a warning? “It’s just a film that expresses a vision, but I hope it can spark reflection and really spread the importance of memory.”
Horror and political satire in the purest sense of the word, played out on the refutation of the romantic myth of the vampire “who lives forever and wants to find love, enjoying the awareness of his eternity.” However, here the general has an existential crisis, he is trying to relive his own memories, the centuries that he has behind him. In fact, Pinochet decided to die also – and above all – because he can no longer bear what they say about him: not that he is a murderer, it suits him. But that he’s not a thief: “It sounds like a joke, but it’s kind of a moral paradox, that’s what a lot of people think about him and Chile: he was supported until they found out that he stole all that money. and then they turned their backs on him. Which is absolutely crazy.”
Alfredo Castro is Pinochet’s butler. Photo: Netflix
There are Pinochet’s dysfunctional children who go to their father for money, Dona Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer), who convinced him to make a coup against Allende, and now wants to be bitten in order to live forever (and enjoy plate), Alfredo Castro is quite often known as a butler nasty (after all, it was usually the butler, right?), an exorcist nun (Paula Luchsinger) and… Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gone). But not in the way you expect, and here – following the principle of no spoilers – I will confine myself to the words of Larraine: “He strongly supported Pinochet. And now that the archives have been released, if we think about how politicians like you, Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger treated these small South American states… they ordered a bomb to be dropped on us, our economy to be destroyed, or just to make sure there were no socialists in power. . By any means.”
What’s amazing, apart from the music – sort of a hidden map of the film, in 13 parts that also spans 250 years, from Vivaldi to Bach, from Benjamin Britten to Arvo Pärt, from György Liget to Andrew Norman – is Ed Lachmann’s magnificent black and white photography : “I wanted to create memorable, beautiful, poetic images. That they had the visual power to tell a story, yet were versatile at the same time.” And he succeeded. “In order to make the film as ‘wide’ as possible, we shot almost everything at a sharp wide angle, very close, the camera is here, on the face, at this distance (gesticulates, ed.). It’s very scary, impossible to hide. It’s a fundamental aspect of photography that integrates with the tradition of some of the directors we’re talking about, from Dreyer to Murnau, from Kubrick – again – to Herzog.” Fairy-tale and expressionistic mood together, “which gives the right distance from the subject, but at the same time allows you to see the most brutal: a smile.”