CHILE '76 - Mark Reviews Movies

Chile '76, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 4, 2023

A woman receives a crash course in the terrors of authoritarianism, the dangers of opposing it, and the all-too-easy guilt of complacency in Chile '76. The debut feature of co-writer/director Manuela Martelli may feature the basic plotting of a thriller, as our protagonist maneuvers through perilous situations with minimal preparation or skill. However, the real crux and intrigue of the narrative are in the juxtaposition of this character's comfortable separation from the threats surrounding her and the actual life-or-death stakes for so many others.

That idea is presented in the film's opening scene, in which Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), the wife of a successful doctor living in Santiago, is getting a specific shade of paint made in a shop. She and her husband Miguel (Alejandro Goic) are renovating their coastal summer home.

As Carmen offers instructions on getting the color just right, gunshots ring out from the streets outside. This is a common occurrence, three years after a coup that resulted in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, but only a minor distraction for those like Carmen, who are literally sheltered from the violence when the shop owner closes the store's shutters.

While Carmen and Miguel oversee the renovations and prepare for their granddaughter's upcoming birthday party, the plot proper revolves around Carmen secretly tending to a young man named Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda), who is being hidden in the rectory of the local church by the pastor Fr. Sánchez (Hugo Medina). The priest tells Carmen that his unexpected ward was shot while the man was stealing food to keep himself from starving, but as Carmen and Elías start talking during the course of his recovery, he lets her know that he's part of a resistance group against the government.

Carmen wants to help, since she dreamed of being a doctor until her father forced her into married life, but the reality of doing so is much more difficult—and, in what becomes the subtly portrayed means of the story's haunting anticlimax, far more inconvenient—than she could imagine. This woman of privilege has to navigate clandestine meetings, spends entire days walking and taking buses to rendezvous points, worries about a national curfew and random police stops, and begins hearing odd noises on the phone and seeing suspicious faces in every stranger whom she meets.

There's plenty of tension here, but one of Martelli's most ingenious tricks in the process of generating it is in how little we see or could know of some sinister actors following or investigating Carmen. Is such activity actually happening? Given what we see of mysterious killings and almost omnipresent government involvement, there's little doubt as to the answer.

Within the justifiably paranoid atmosphere of Chile '76, though, Martelli's true focus is in watching this character awaken to the horrors outside of the contentment and ease of her existence. The real question, then, is whether or not any actual change occurs, as well as what that says about how such horrors are allowed to continue.

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