Released in France February 16, 2011.
A close excellent Carancho, by Argentinian Pablo Trapero, released in France two weeks ago, we discovered today, not without amazement, the new film by the rising star of Chilean cinema, Pablo Larrain. At 35, he signed with Santiago 73, postmortem his third feature film after having been revealed in 2008 by Tony Manero, hallucinatory portrait of a fan of John Travolta who becomes a serial killer under the Pinochet regime.
Santiago 73 is thus the second installment of a trilogy devoted to the dark years of dictatorship in Chile, largely taboo in a country where divisions and hatreds are still alive. The film takes place in a relatively short period of time surrounding the coup d'état, September 11, 1973, by General Augusto Pinochet against the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende, who committed suicide in the besieged palace of La Moneda . But these tragic events, which constitute the heart of the film are hardly shown in Santiago, 73.
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History is deliberately seen by the small end of the telescope, through the strange romantic relationship that two people living ordinary. Mario is a lonely middle-aged and morose, minor official at the forensic institute in Santiago, Chile, where he transcribed the autopsy reports. Nancy's neighbor's house across the street, is a stripper cabaret, half hysterical, living with his parents and refusing to admit that it has reached the age limit. Mario is crazy about Nancy. He looks out the window every day, attends all her shows, claims to be her protector when she does not even suspect its existence.
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A brief adventure brings them together, which the coup cut short abruptly. One morning, on waking, Mario find the home of Nancy, where they used to meet the communist militants, sacked and deserted. While at the morgue, entrusted by the coup, dead tributary Mario frantically search his sweetheart. He finally found her hidden in the company of a beautiful communist lover. Subsequently, we keep quiet, is despicable and gives rise to one of the most violent sequences concluding, without a shred of actual brutality, the history of cinema.
This paradox is a good indication of the stakes of the film, which is the moral conscience. How dark does it in abjection fascism: this is the only question that arises and we ask Santiago 73 through the character of Mario greyish be basically immobile in a changing reality, the more docile to the monstrosity of history.
The virtue of the film is not to suggest that response by the philosophical essay and debate of ideas, but by staging a climate and trajectory flawed, ridiculous, oppressive, an anonymous. Pablo Larrain takes in this respect all risks: colors desaturated (print Spooky), fragmented and fixed frames (registration problematic characters in space and history), actors hieratic (Alfredo Castro and Antonia Zegers, bizarre and beautiful birds of the Apocalypse), set pieces (the unsustainable dissection of Salvador Allende), temporal paradoxes (the corpse of Nancy, shown early in the film).
The complex, which hover on the shades of Kafka and Franju, evokes the world of limbo, haunted by ghosts, where everything is somehow already played, has already taken place. Elegant way of saying that the film does not pretend not reconstitute a historical reality, does not even pretend to be, but is actually after the disaster, the side and from the perspective of the dead, looking like them to redemption.
This aesthetic, come to think the only honest and the most relevant, is reminiscent of recent Vincere, Marco Bellocchio, the enfant terrible of Italian cinema, which took fascism likewise obliquely, by the tangent torque and emotional alienation. Less operatic than its glorious elder, Santiago 73, post mortem, Pablo Larrain, the film is also a son who asks accountable to its fathers.
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