Film Review/Ed Rampell

‘Chile ’76’

The chilling Chilean film tells the story of an upper-middle class woman swept into the country’s antifascist resistance.

Chilean co-writer-director Manuela Martelli’s award-winning “Chile ’76” takes place three years after the US-backed coup d’etat that toppled the pro-socialist government of President Salvador Allende in the nation’s capital of Santiago on Sept. 11, 1973. The antifascist feature opens at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on Jan. 6—the second anniversary of the Trump-orchestrated attempted coup in Washington, D.C., against America’s constitutional republic and the will of US voters. “Chile ’76” (entitled “1976” in Chile) is in Spanish with English subtitles and is set for a U.S. theatrical release in April.

In “Chile ’76,” Carmen (played by Spanish actress Aline Küppenheim) is an upper middle-class woman swept into the resistance against the brutal regime of the jack-booted thug General Augusto Pinochet that butchered and tortured tens of thousands of pro-Allende Chileans. Leaving her home in Santiago, Carmen drives a Peugeot to her beach house to spend the holidays with her family. There, under false pretenses, Carmen’s priest, Padre Sanchez (Hugo Medina), lures her into caring for a young man hiding in the church who has been shot in the thigh.

The priest tells the unsuspecting Carmen that Elias (Nicolás Sepúlveda) is a “common criminal.” (His name may be a reference to the Biblical prophet Elijah.) But it turns out that the long-haired, bearded youth is actually part of the anti-Pinochet underground. Padre Sanchez has likely chosen Carmen as a caregiver because her husband is a doctor and because, in her youth, the fifty-something grandmother had been in the Red Cross. The priest exploits Carmen’s medical background and connections, which enable her to surreptitiously obtain antibiotics, bandages, etc., and to apply them to the wounded Elias.

Over time, helping to heal the injured dissident, Carmen discovers the truth, that her patient belongs to the opposition. And, as he recovers, by attempting to aid Elias in escaping, Carmen also becomes embroiled in the resistance to Pinochet’s wretched rule. In doing so, Carmen places herself and her unsuspecting family in harm’s way. And will a May-December romance bloom between Carmen and Elias?

“Chile ’76” dramatizes the moral dilemma of what individuals must often do when confronting military dictatorships, and possible imprisonment, torture, or even execution. Should Carmen step out of her upper-class comfort zone to resist, thereby endangering herself and loved ones?

In another telling scene, Carmen and her husband, Miguel (Alejandro Goic), are living what Federico Fellini calls la dolce vita, enjoying an outing on their bourgeois pals’ sailboat, when the wife spews vicious anti-communist, pro-Pinochet propaganda. Carmen literally vomits; the others assume she’s seasick, but the audience can sense Carmen’s moral revulsion at the rightwing rant.

Martelli’s movie opens a window into what it’s like living under a strongman regime for which, as George Orwell put it in “1984,” the future is a hobnailed “boot stamping on a human face—forever.” In daily life, even the most intimate conversations might be betrayed by informers to the secret police. In one of several similar scenes, the topic of politics comes up over dinner at Carmen’s summer home and Miguel quickly shuts down the discussion. Under totalitarianism, one never knows who may be listening, or who will betray you to the thought police.

The reviled Pinochet remains an offscreen presence haunting “Chile ’76,” though he is heard in one scene preempting a movie that Carmen and her grandchildren are watching on television. Rather cleverly, the fascist general disrupts a shootout during a gangster picture to deliver a Red Scare-type pronouncement.

This is not the first time Küppenheim (whose professional acting debut was in a stage production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera”) and Goic have acted in Chilean coup-themed movies. In 2014, she co-starred as Miria Contreras, aka “La Payita,” the secretary and purported lover of the doomed leftist President in Chilean director Miguel Littin’s “Allende en su Laberinto.” Goic appeared in the 2020 thriller “Matar a Pinochet,” about a failed assassination plot against the dictator.

Previously, the 39-year-old, Santiago-born Martelli has been primarily known as an actress. Her acting accolades include winning the Best Actress award for “B-Happy” at the Havana Film Festival in 2003 while only a teenager. Martelli co-starred opposite Dutch thespian Rutger Hauer of “Blade Runner” fame in 2013’s “Il Futuro.”

“Chile ’76” is the first feature-length narrative film that Martelli has helmed, and is an impressive directorial debut (she had previously shot three short films). Her adeptly directed 95 minute movie has already won Best Director at the Athens International Film Festival, Best International Debut at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and Best Actress at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Küppenheim richly deserves this honor, as she quietly, convincingly depicts a heroine who grows in consciousness even as she becomes increasingly entangled in danger.

Martelli’s film adroitly veers from realism to surrealism; in particular, dripping paint has a symbolic significance that spreads from onscreen action to the credit titles of “Chile ’76,” bestowing at times a Buñuelian panache. Luis Buñuel was an antifascist who lived in exile outside of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain, where another feature that is reminiscent of “Chile ’76” is set. In Alain Resnais’ 1966 “La Guerre est Finie,” Yves Montand plays a Spanish leftist who, against all odds, leaves the safety of France to cross the border and carry out clandestine actions against Franco’s dictatorial regime in Spain. “Chile ’76” also put me in mind of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 science fiction classic “Alphaville,” wherein Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina resist a futuristic totalitarian state.

Of course, Martelli’s period piece made me think of Costa-Gavras’ profoundly upsetting 1982 film “Missing,” wherein Americans played by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek (both nominated for best acting Oscars for their roles) search for their loved one after Pinochet wreaks havoc in Chile. Costa-Gavras co-won a screenwriting Oscar for “Missing,” which was also nominated for Best Picture, as the Reagan Administration unleashed counterinsurgencies throughout Latin America.

“Chile ’76” is a promising full-length motion picture debut for Manuela Martelli, the latest in a long line of distinguished anti-totalitarian works. In exploring the aftereffects of the despicable Nixon- Kissinger-backed coup which installed the odiously monstrous Pinochet, Martelli casts a half-century’s worth of light in her own country, and on the fallout of the failed Jan. 6 coup attempt in the United States, as well.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2023

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