CIFF 2022 | ‘Chile ‘76’ review: A sharp, sensitive reckoning with Chile’s darkest year
Actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli draws on the fraught history of her family and home country to weave a haunting tale of life during civil wartime.
Aline Küppenheim in “Chile ‘76.” Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.
When news of Manuela Martelli’s “Chile ‘76” first hit the scene, it was a point of curiosity, if not outright confusion, that her filmic reckoning with one of the darkest years in Chilean history would be seen through the eyes of an upper-middle-class protagonist. It is well-known that civil conflicts, let alone any kind of severe national instability, disproportionately affect the working-class — to have a bourgeois lead character might seem at first blush to be a terrible faux pas. Thankfully, however, “Chile ‘76” defies expectations in this way (and many others). Martelli is upper-middle-class herself, and it appears that by writing what she knows best; drawing on both her late grandmother’s life and her own lived experiences, she has created a deft, sensitive picture of Chile under the Pinochet regime that is anything but dismissive of the lower class struggle.
One beautiful day in 1976, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a stately, middle-aged “Mummy-needs-her-pills”-type matriarch, heads to her beautiful beach house on the Chilean coast to oversee its refurbishment. But Carmen is not your typical upper-class dowager. In between attending book clubs and supervising her home’s sweepers, she takes it upon herself to help those suffering under the tyranny of her country’s new regime. What initially starts as discreetly obtaining illicit antibiotic prescriptions for girls with botched abortions turns into nursing wounded stranger Elias (Nicolás Sepúlveda) back to health, even though he is on the run from Pinochet’s military police. But this simple act of compassion soon threatens to branch into a lethal course of action, as Carmen is drawn deeper into helping Elias return home.
Martelli handles the violent legacy of her home country with surprising care and sensitivity. Those disappeared under the Pinochet regime are indeed never seen again, but as with all collateral damage under civil war, haunting remnants of them can always be found especially when one least wants or needs to be reminded of it. A lone shoe missing its partner is found beneath Carmen’s car. The sight of a briefly abandoned police car appears on the beach, its occupants rushing to investigate a fleeting act of brutality. In Martelli’s view, empty shoes are a pure and simple image of absence; a symbol of incompleteness that reflects how Carmen’s sheltered worldview is now crumbling. But rest assured, Carmen is no upper-class saviour free from reproach. She is never touted as a hero for simply doing the right thing. Rather, she resolutely remains a small cog in the revolutionary machine; the film’s focus instead locking onto the connection between Carmen and Elias, and the emotional toll this secret takes on her.
What elevates “Chile ‘76” over most other dramas in this vein, besides its intimate, microcosmic scope, is its extremely unconventional soundtrack. Instead of the classical string and brass fare that usually accompanies dramas like this, composer Mariá Portugal instead opts for 70s synths and throbbing ambient noise that uncomfortably cuts through the bourgeois banalities in Carmen’s life, sounding not unlike a radio being tuned to constantly shifting frequencies. Always in sync with Carmen’s secret anxieties, the noise grows nauseating during the film’s tensest moments, coming close to hitting the mythical brown note as we fear the worst for Carmen’s family after they have remained offscreen for too long. This disavowal of soundtrack conventions also helps ground viewers in the spirit of the real struggle, by using music that is arguably more relatable to the common people than the usual stately detached classical scores.
“Chile ‘76” is admittedly a film that people may or may not find thrilling to very different degrees. There are not many overt threats of violence against Carmen for the vast majority of the film. Nor is the subversive action she undertakes the same edge-of-your-seat espionage that one might see in a James Bond film. Instead, the film’s tension turns on the latent paranoia of living under a dictatorship; being forced to communicate in riddles and triple-guess every word that comes out of your mouth. How do we live while deluding ourselves that the atrocities happening outside our families will never penetrate our inner sanctums? How do you deal with the absence of someone that nobody but you knew existed? Through this evocative tale of life during civil wartime and that haunting final shot, Martelli ensures that these questions will resonate with her viewers, reminding us that our current zeitgeist makes them more relevant than ever.
