Review by Beatrice On 31-Aug-2023
Augusto Pinochet has become eternal, he is a vampire, feeding on centrifuged heart muscle and flying undisturbed.
He is tired of living, he no longer sees the point of it, especially all the "backbiting" he has to endure while his "faithful" servant loves him, his 60-year-old wife cheats on him even though she desires him, and his children try to locate and untangle the sea of financial treasures their father has amassed.
On a huge estate in a Patagonian wasteland now lives the count, who has had other identities in the past, always as a vampire, the first as Claude Pinoche in France during the French Revolution where he witnessed the beheading of Queen Marie Antoinette and her husband King Louis XVI on Oct. 16, 1793. There he was a simple peasant/vampire, a commoner belonging to the Third Estate oppressed by the power of the Clergy and Nobility, who nevertheless decides to fight any form of revolution from below.
This is what Pablo Larrain's sophisticated and ambitious film is built on, and it is no coincidence that it starts at the very moment when the path of establishing a new idea of state after the overcoming of the Ancien Regime begins.
Precisely about the new idea of state and the inevitable "Restorations" or dictatorships, whatever you want to call them, that followed in the centuries to come, Larrain does not hesitate to inform about the facts that determined, caused, validated, confirmed and above all endorsed the misdeeds, crimes, atrocities the usurpations, the misappropriations of wealth accumulated for years by the Chilean dictator following the emblematic coup d'état supported by the United States D'America, in an anti-communist function, to the detriment of the legitimate government of socialist President Salvador Allende, who committed suicide during the coup.
Obviously, the Chilean director, surprisingly resorts to a fable where, fantasy is skillfully intertwined with factual reality to prompt the dutiful question mark: where does the reality that often surpasses fantasy end, to locate the interpretation, the vision, the allegory the metaphor that skillfully runs through the film?
A mysterious narrative voice, very British, will reveal its identity during the course of the work, during which another equally enigmatic, ambiguous and fascinating ecclesiastical figure will be the emblem of the Chilean director's anticlerical vision already amply illustrated in another masterful work such as El club.
The concept of power, complicity, responsibility but above all EVIL runs through the entire structure of the film, in which, cynicism, sarcasm, disenchantment and violence for its own sake are the frame on which the black and white narrative is reflected.
The film's is an old idea, Larrain says, which is based on the most dangerous of concepts, that a figure like Pinochet's can be eternal and that evil can survive. I don't know if it can be an allegory because it is very direct. I think it is right to say something like this at a time when it seems that history is repeating itself, to remind us how dangerous we are.
From the French Revolution to contemporary reality, history reiterates the human attitude of servant and master, not so much that of Hegelian memory as that of the enlightened Etienne De La Boetie who had identified the inevitably human trait, a kind of human fingerprint, all too human: voluntary servitude, to whatever master that is power, money, vice, cruelty, savagery, domination, fame.
Only evil such as restoration and counterrevolution has this aura of eternity because revolution is no longer possible: it lacks the enemy to fight, who is now invisible, impersonal, ethereal and while flying like a vampire feeding on flesh and blood.
A funny, sarcastic gothic drama about the human condition, inattentive, superficial, supine to the persistence of political/economic/social defeat; after all, if revolution is not possible, let everyone freely choose his master, vampire or not!
What I really think is that evil is never radical, only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor a demonic dimension. It can invade and devastate the whole world, because it spreads over the surface like a fungus. It challenges thought, because thought seeks to reach the depths, to go to the roots, and the moment it seeks evil, it is frustrated because it finds nothing. This is its banality.
31-Aug-2023 by Beatrice
