OPPRESSION DEADENS THE SOUL: 2 Films by Pablo Larraín

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín's most recent film is "No," starring Gael Garcia Bernal, which I have not yet seen.  It was in theatres for a week, then seemed to just disappear.  It may well be Larraín's final installment in a trilogy about the assassination of Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet's 17 year regime in Chile.  The first two are "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem."  Over the past few days I watched both  and came away haunted and depressed.  All three films were made in the past five years, but look much older as though Larraín eschewed recent film-making technology.

Alfredo Castro as Tony Manero

TONY MANERO (2008)

Larraín shoots a bleak palette and uses no soundtrack save for ambient noise in around the locations, the radio, CD player, and live music.  "Tony Manero" set during the Pinochet reign,  stars Alfredo Castro (also one of the writers) as Raul Peralta, a soulless, shell of a skinny, middle-aged, impotent man who is obsessed with the John Travolta character of Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever".   Raul lives in a seedy neighborhood where he rents a room from an older, blowzy woman, Wilma (Elsa Poblete).  The other tenant is his girlfriend Cony (Ampuro Noguero), who has a teen-age daughter, Pauli, and an adolescent son.  Their quarters are above a cheap nightclub run by Wilma, where Raul, Cuyo, Pauli's boyfriend, and Cony perform sleazy, amateurish dances to recorded music. So obsessed is Raul with Manero that he goes to the neighborhood movie house several times to see Travolta in action.  He leans forward, eyes moist with tears, reciting every word as the characters speak them.  He goes to a casting call for a Tony Manero look alike contest to be broadcast on TV; he gets the dates mixed up and discovers it's for Chuck Norris, but finagles his way to sign up for next week's call for Manero.

Castro is very thin and wiry,with a sad sack face, droopy eyes and bags.  His hair is a lank, brownish grey.   He bears a slight resemblance to actor/activist/narrator Peter Coyote. Castro plays Raul as a totally hollow man, a cypher, an expressionless zombie.   He shows absolutely no emotion- not even when ruthlessly destroying property or committing the most shocking murders to further his Manero image.  The theatre proprietor makes the fatal mistake of switching from "Fever" to "Grease."  Same actor, Raul is told, but that's not the point.  Raul is insanely focused on becoming that character.   He has a white suit made to order and carries it around in a garment bag. He runs around, robbing and manipulating people to do his bidding, first befriending the weak and vulnerable with smarmy charm.  He comes to the aid of a woman being purse-snatched.  He sees that she gets home.  The result is that she'd have been better off dealing with the purse snatchers.   The women with whom he lives seem to adore him.  Why? Desperate people do desperate things?  Wilma wants to run away with him; Cony is all over him, even Pauli succumbs.   Throughout the the film, there are scenes of Pinochet's thugs carrying  out witch hunts, snatching people off the streets.   In one, on a piece of deserted, vacant, rubble-strewn land, the thugs leave their victim's body lying in the shrubs.  Peralta had hidden from them, watching.  When they leave, he goes through the corpse's pockets, takes its money and watch.

Things come to a head when Goyo, Pauli's boyfriend, signs up for the Manero contest, too.  He makes the mistake of modeling  his suit in front of the others.  Goyo, played by Hector Morales, looks more like John Travolta than Raul could only dream of.  The night before the contest, Raul soils Goyo's suit in the most sickening way you can imagine.  The day of the contest, Pinochet's thugs barge into their home, browbeat  Pauli, Cony, and Wilma, shove them against walls, and shout at them to "name names."  Goyo walks in on the fracas, complaining about the mess Raul made of his suit only to be ordered to shut up and sit down.  Peralta, in his pristine white suit, black shirt; hair blackened and combed a la Travolta, hides in a secret space under the stairs; he manages to sneak away to the contest, leaving the others in the hands of Pinochet's men.  Once there, he tries to jump the line, but fails.  He is second to last to compete.  Unbelievably, it's a close call.  Peralta does exude an atom of charisma and executes all the right moves, but without passion.   The film ends abruptly when he gets on the same bus as the winner and his girlfriend.  Knowing what he did to get this far, you can probably guess what's in store for this innocent, happy couple.

I feel that Larrain used this film as a symbol for what went on during the Pinochet years.  The character of Raul Peralta represents the mindless atrocities that regime wreaked on innocent people.  Pinochet, USA puppet, aided by our CIA and Henry Kissinger, had Allende assassinated and tried to to make it look like suicide, which is the subject of "Post Mortem," which follows, though looked at obliquely, as did "Tony Manero."

Alfredo Castro and Ampuro Neguero

POST MORTEM (2010)

Chile, 1973, during the last days of Salvador Allende's presidency.  Augusto Pinochet was set to become dictator and was already having people who oppose him as well as communists, sympathizers, and suspected communists "disappeared."  Alfredo Castro plays Mario Cornejo, an autopsy transcriber at a morgue's recording office.  He types up notes on a manual typewriter as the medical examiner performs autopsies and dictates the findings.  The opening scenes are quite grisly, showing none of the fresh-looking bodies one sees on popular TV police procedurals.  These, laid out on a slab, are a deathly grey.  The ME cuts them open and flaps the flesh aside, revealing greyish-brown clumps of organs.  Some of the bodies are morbidly obese.

Cornejo lives alone, across the street from a couple of women, one of whom is a burlesque dancer, Nancy Puelma (Antonio Zegers).  Cornejo's love for her is unrequited.  He hears about the arrest of her brother and father, a prominent Communist and Salvador Allende supporter.  When Nancy unaccountably disappears on Sept. 11, 1973  (Chile's 9/11), after a violent Army raid on her family's home, and others, he commiserates with her roommate, Sandra (Ampuro Neguero), and begins his fruitless search for her.  In one scene, Sandra unexpectedly visits Mario; he fixes her a simple meal of rice and an egg.  They sit in silence for a minute or so, then both begin sobbing quietly, unashamedly, which goes on for what seems like several minutes.  It is as if all the sorrow of the loved ones that Pinochet had murdered and disappeared that fateful day is contained in these two beings.

There are scenes of Mario and his morgue co-workers riding along in an open cart, picking up bodies.  There are so many, now, they slide off the cart on to the street.  The morgue is overwhelmed; they can't keep up so are reduced to just noting where the bullet entrance and exit wounds are.  It is as this point that one's loyalty is measured.  Obeying an order from an army officer, Cornejo is told, to his surprise, that he is now a member of the Chilean army.  Any one who balks is executed.  In a scene filmed in a hospital corridor, a respected doctor with whom Cornejo had worked resists a superior colleague's orders.  Shockingly, the superior pulls a gun from his lab coat and shoots his colleague point blank.

Towards the film's end, a fully, dressed, uniformed body is brought in.  The lower half of its face has been shot off, making the corpse unidentifiable.  The chief ME orders Cornejo to transcribe his notes, but his typewriter is missing.  He's told to use another.  He says he will try, but it's electric.  He's never typed on one.  The camera zeros in on the corpse's head and we see that the lower half is hamburger.  Fortunately, Larraín used the same bleak, washed out palette as in "Manero" so we are spared the color of blood and gore.   As the assistants cut away, one by one, they lay down their instruments and say, "We can't do this,"  and walk away, some in tears.   Cornejo pecks away at the keys slowly.  He's not keeping up and apologizes.  An army officer takes over, typing skillfully.  The cause of death is discussed.  The doctor concludes that the death was an assassination, made to look like a suicide.  With this we know that they are performing Allende's autopsy.

As Mario and Sandra's friendship grows, she becomes demanding.  She is hunted by Pinochet's men.  Mario agrees to hide her in a niche behind a brick wall, which he covers with a wooden wardrobe.  Cornejo takes care of her cat.  She wants this, she order, and "Mario, get me that."  Her demands becomes too much for this simple man.  The final straw is that she wants a radio.  He unplugs his own from the wall, brings it to the niche.  "I need one with batteries!" she shouts.  Cornejo pushes the wardrobe back over the niche.  What follows is mesmerizing. The camera stays on the wooden wardrobe, the  brick wall for a few seconds.  Cornejo walks into the frame carrying an empty bookcase which he shoves in front of the wardrobe.  Larraín hold the frame as Cornejo walks in and out of it, each time tossing more wooden chairs, bookcases, and tables on top of the growing pile.  Cornejo walks out of the frame one last time.  The scene freezes, the credits roll.  Again, we don't know what happens, but whatever it is, it won't be pretty.  So ends the second of Pablo Larrain's films symbolizing Augusto Pinochet's reign: that of a a ruthless, meglo-maniacal dictator, driving the oppressed to desperation.

Look for a review of "No," the final link in Larraín 's Pinochet trilogy,  soon.