The Spirit of Alan J. Pakula Lives in Chile ’76
Decades after his death, Alfred Hitchcock’s name is still instinctively used to describe taut political thrillers like Manuela Martelli’s feature debut, Chile ’76. Set 3 years after Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the film steeps in unease for 90 minutes; it’s the product of a nation contemporarily inclined toward fractured partisan politics, as if Martelli intends for her audience to face the historical rearview as a reminder of what happens to democracies when they catch a case of hyper-polarization. (They go up in flames. That’s what happens.)
The first appropriate qualifier for Chile ’76 that anyone should reach for is “urgent.” But rather than “Hitchcockian,” the second qualifier should be “Pakulan.” Chile ’76 shares in common the same pliable atmospheric sensibility as the movies of Alan J. Pakula; Martelli roots her plot in realism one moment, then surrealism the next, oscillating between a sharp-lined authenticity and dreamlike paranoia. Martelli shoots for something firmer than Hitchcock melodrama, something viewers can throw their hands against, something that, even for American audiences, feels terribly recognizable despite being distant in terms of years and substance. We haven’t had a Pinochet-style takeover here in these United States. We haven’t even had an attempt at a Pinochet-style takeover; the January 6th insurrection was a clown fiesta compared with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état.
Successful or not, serious or not, government-backed or not, moments like January 6th should echo through the hearts and minds of Martelli’s viewers when they sit down for Chile ’76. It’s a warning shot across the bow: Beware, or be under the thumb of a brutal dictatorship. Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), Martelli’s protagonist, lives that way, though she tries not to think about it. The film opens with her poring over an Italian travel guide at a paint shop, painstakingly searching for the right shades of pink and blue for her new beach house; maybe she’s particular, or maybe she finds particularity a distraction from state-sponsored kidnappings conducted in broad daylight. Either way, as Carmen browses color swatches, a woman is snatched off the street by anonymous thugs, and she screams her lungs out.
Martelli doesn’t show her face. We get to know what’s happening; we don’t get to see who it’s happening to, and we never learn why. Carmen doesn’t ignore the incident, per se, but she keeps her innermost feelings about it to herself. You might imagine her identifying as “apolitical” when pressed; it isn’t until her friendly neighborhood priest, Father Sanchez (Hugo Medina), quietly approaches her with the task of caring for Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda), a so-called common criminal suffering from a gunshot wound, that Carmen is forced out of her neutral comfort zone. Elías isn’t so common, it turns out. He’s fleeing Pinochet’s version of the Gestapo. Carmen’s candy-coated existence cracks apart. She sees her world for what it is: A waking nightmare where eyes are everywhere, and anyone might happily turn Elías, and her, over to the police if they’re given reason to.