Chile ’76: A Fantastic Woman, by David Bax
After Manuela Martelli‘s Chile ’76 has singed its brief, burning impression onto whatever screen you watched it on, what you’re likely to come away with first is the score by Mariá Portugal. Not that you’ll be humming it like you’re leaving a performance of Hello, Dolly! or something. Rather, you’ll feel haunted by its ominous chords. Much like our protagonist, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), you may feel unsafe and pursued.
Chile ’76 is essentially a noir film about an everywoman who gets in over her head. As such, there’s a sense of paranoia verging on dread that hangs over the entire picture. The music is only one part of it. There is also, on the other hand, the silence. The screenplay, by Martelli and Alejandra Moffat, is economical to the point of sparsity.
Unlike standard issue noir, though, in which the character becomes embroiled in crime of the civilian (if sometimes organized) variety, Chile ’76 involves political crime and the always present threat of domestic political violence. A loose comparison to the golden age of Hollywood noir might be Fred Zinnemann‘s excellent Act of Violence. Chilean audience wouldn’t have been surprised to find that to be the case; in its home country, the movie is simply called 1976 and the evocation of the early years of the Pinochet regime is likely enough to suggest the subject matter. By the time housewife and one-time medical student Carmen agrees to help a small town priest care for and hide a member of the resistance who has been wounded by Pinochet’s forces, she has already been living in the midst of political mayhem as all Chileans were. She’s just looking at it in the face now.
Nearly all of Chile ’76 rests on Küppenheim’s shoulders and she carries the weight with a stern grace. You may remember her in Sebastián Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman as the ex-wife of the main character’s late boyfriend. There, she was a cruel and small-minded person. Here, she is of course more sympathetic but never cloyingly so. Carmen is an intelligent woman who is cautious about how she expresses herself.
That means her performance is custom built for the cinematography of Soledad Rodríguez (one of many credited cinematographers on the recent Argentine film Trenque Lauquen). Rodríguez’ camera is similarly patient but inquisitive. Often still or slow, it is nevertheless persistent and given to medium shots and closer.
Historical political noir thriller is a mouthful of a subgenre. But, with Chile ’76, Martelli manages to hit all the elements and emphasize the thriller part without ever putting her thumb on the scale.
