ROME – The story is (unfortunately) well known: On September 11, 1973, Chilean military leader Augusto Pinochet staged a coup d’état that overthrew then-President Salvador Allende, who died the same day under mysterious circumstances (suicide or murder, there’s a lot about that spoke). Exactly fifty years later, Pinochet (Jaime Wadell) is still alive. He is a vampire, a 250-year-old undead willing to do anything to die forever, but not before the vultures around him give him a final bite. It starts from here El Condenew film by Pablo Larraín (already available on Netflix), a director who is now a regular in competition at the Venice Film Festival after his previous Jackie with Natalie Portman (about another piece of history, Kennedy), Emma AND Spencer with Kristen Stewart (aka Lady Di).
Ambitious project El Conde. A dark comedy wrapped in black-and-white expressionist atmospheric horror, it examines with irony and determination the impact of Pinochet’s terrible years on modern Chile. And he does this by turning a person into a real bloodsucker who has sucked life out of his country: there will be three thousand of them. disappeared his regime. A terrible story already told by Larraín between Post-mortem examination AND No – Rainbow daysand also from the movies between Missing Costa Gavras e Santiago, Italy Nanni Moretti. Originally conceived by Larraín as a miniseries for Netflix (and then decisively turned to an auteur feature film), the choice to tell Pinochet’s story in these colors was born from the idea of coming face to face with an inconvenient figure for Chile and for the history of the 20th century precisely on the fiftieth anniversary of those terrible days .
“Pinochet brought horror, tragedy and violence that destroyed my country. Through this dark comedy I would like to observe, analyze and understand the events that have happened in Chile over the past fifty years.” But completely unpunished. In our world, Pinochet died on December 10, 2006, a millionaire and a free man, complete with photographs of John Paul II from 1987: “Pinochet was a man who never stood trial for his actions. This carelessness made it eternal. It’s very painful, but it’s true…” This is where the narrative journey begins El Conde with Augusto Pinochet Larrain, who was brought onto the stage by the veteran Vadel, a mythological creature born during the French Revolution under the name Claude Pinochet.
Pinochet/Pinochet, a superb observer of the fall of Louis XVI until his landing in Chile, where he becomes fully aware of himself as an autocrat and a murderer, uses his otherworldly powers to defeat any possible revolution. Then archival photographs, Radetzky March, irreverent voiceoverspit on the window, label “Defender, bandit from Banana Republic.“, a hint that such an evil person could only be possessed by the devil. Finally, the picturesque appearance of the nun Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger) as the voice of the conscience of history, Larraín and therefore the entire Chilean people, indicting all the reprehensible actions of El Conde Pinochet in a long didactic but necessary list.
Where the consequences of the allegory about blood-sucking vampires end (“The blood of South American workers is pungent and smells like dog. Plebeian bouquet» reads a line of dialogue voiceover) – and with them all the proposals of horror films of the 1920s in the spirit Nosferatu – the story begins in El Conde. And history tells us that much of the world chose not to see the brutal actions of the man to whom Larrain gives one last, decadent glimpse of greatness: the plan to destroy the International Tribunal at The Hague. However, like any self-respecting, memorable villain, Larrena’s Pinochet does not want or seek redemption, to the end torn between the desire for death and conquest, not fully understanding why part of the population does not remember him as a savior.
Pinochet Larraina is a rotten man. A corrupt and manipulative undead, pathetic seducer, torn to pieces by his children, who appeared at his bedside only to divide a very rich inheritance, who only under the guise of a general can slide around his country in search of innocent victims to bleed to death. And there you have it El Conde. A complex, disturbing film, with an almost impossible concept and (perhaps) inferior to the corpus of Larraín films as a whole. However, this is a film that exudes greatness from every pore of its ambitious artistic visions. Because today Chile is able to walk with its head held high and perhaps finally leave behind one of the darkest periods of its history, and therefore of all humanity.
- OPINIONS | Spencer, Kristen Stewart and the ghost story of Larraín
- LONG | Nosferatu, or the masterpiece that lived twice
- DOCCORN | Strength and intelligence, Rossellini, Allende and history
Below you can see the film’s trailer: