An ultra effective paranoid thriller mixed with a backdrop in Chile of the Pinochet years, this is the double promise of Chile 1976 emerging these days in physical format. The ideal opportunity to (re)dive into this suffocating feature film...
My priest in the rebels
Carmen (Aline Küppenheim) goes, accompanied by her husband and family, to oversee the renovation of their holiday home. Yet, at the request of a priest she knows well, she will use her medical training to help a young man who is secretly housed in the Church. In a world where the Pinochet dictatorship puts its nose everywhere, this human choice will irreparably shake its daily life.
After several shorts and a co-creation, Manuela Martelli goes to long format with Chile 1976. And it is from an eminently personal soil – the suicide of her grandmother whom she had never known – that the director germinates her character of Carmen, a upper-class bourgeois woman, a mother in the household, whose life changes overnight. And everything is born within a decidedly programmatic scene, opening Chile 1976 Like a movie in the movie...
Seminal scene
Carmen, sitting, occupies the stage of a painter where she gives her orders as to the nuances she wishes to obtain for the coating intended for her holiday home. Outside, out there, we'll hear a squeal of tires and the derailed voice of a woman shouting at the kidnapping without anyone getting hurt. The craftsman lowers the curtain, Carmen finds herself immersed in the dark. Lockup begins.
The scene is short, yet, in a handful of well-chosen plans, Manuela Martelli sets us up without a word (or almost) the overall framework of her story. We immediately understand Carmen's social position, we notice her relative carelessness in the face of the state violence that takes place off the street (is she a member of an untouchable caste?) and the tension that will pass through Chile 1976 early plans.
Lancinating duality
This sequence will also be the occasion for Martelli to appear a pattern that will return regularly throughout the film, the mass of color gradually invaded by the introduction of a new tint: of the title in cardboard opening (white, gradually letting itself wrap with a red courage that will dye it whole), the mass of painting of the craftsman that Carmen modifies as she pleases and filmed in close-up, then later a dish of whipped cream reds a dye (captured in the same way) or even the water gradually mixed with the hemoglobin of an injury that is cleaned. A motif that will cross everything Chile 1976, too strong to be annoyed.
And if it immediately evokes the Pinochet powder trail contaminating with its fascinating ideas a society muzzled by the dictatorship, the image could just as easily stick to Carmen's mental state stuck in a pugnacious cognitive dissonance: on the one hand the great bourgeois who has every interest in covering her interests (financial, political, family) despite her convictions, the other humanist and caregiver who cannot ignore the call of the loan to save the life of the young man sought by the police. Two antithetical situations, decidedly unmiscible, confronting the very heart of an individual: Carmen.
Deceptive pastels
On the picture side, Chile 1976 adorned with a canon photograph, bearing the pastels of the seventies and slightly smooth colors that give the image an inimitable stamp. But if the aesthetics of the film can only convince, the slow and laid rhythm may seem dissonant in front of the thriller genre in which the feature film fits. And this is Manuela Martelli's tour de force!
Instead of offering an angry film, she will slowly infuse her paranoid atmosphere into an almost lancinating rhythm, supported by minimal music, alternating between almost total erasure and intrusive invasion. The more plans follow, the more threatening this police dictatorship constantly kept out of sight. And as false fears multiply, the inevitability of the fall becomes more and more gripping until it becomes perfectly suffocating. A particularly skilful device, which would be described as perfect if the sometimes over-armed camera movements (zooms, de-zooms, side panels, etc.) were omitted to breathe tension into the plane. A tranquillity overflow that sometimes looks like a forced hair, while a simple fixed plane device would have more easily distilled all the tension that the filmed scene required.
Anyway, you'll understand, Chile 1976 augurs for a career for her young director and is one of the must-haves among the thriller offers of 2023! An asphyxiating film, skillful both in its background and in its form, which benefits from its physical release in this month of November... Strongly recommended, which can easily be seen in diptych at the very recent The Count (El Conde) of Pablo Larrain, also treating Chile as Pinochet but not under the prism of a constant out-of-the-field haunting, but taking the side of a fantastic assumed where the dictator would appear under the traits of a vampire... A whole program!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 92 minutes
Release Date: November 21, 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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