22/10/2013
The Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín never expected to make a trilogy about life under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90), during which thousands of the country’s citizens were executed or disappeared. Yet that’s exactly what he created with his last three features: “Tony Manero” (2007), “Post Mortem” (2010) and “No” (2012). Darkly, at times queasily humorously, each tracks Chilean Everymen — a John Travolta impersonator in the first movie and a morgue worker in the second, both brilliantly played by Alfredo Castro — whose lives are inexorably upended by violence.
“No” is funnier and lighter than the first two movies, and both its tone and star, Gael García Bernal (as an adman who helps topple Pinochet through a hilarious TV campaign), made it an easier sell. Mr. Larraín has had an agent and manager for years, but with “No,” he also had a distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, that could pay for a serious Academy Awards push. (It was nominated for best foreign-language film, losing to “Amour.”) All this attention has probably made Mr. Larraín a bigger target, especially for those leery of his family background (his parents are politicians on the right; he’s on the left) and of his insistently playful, perverse approach to history.
“We have a strange relationship with fiction here,” Mr. Larraín said in August, speaking by phone from Santiago, where he lives with his wife, the actress Antonia Zegers, and their two young children. Some on the right in Chile thought “No” was “against them,” he said, while some on the left complained that an adman defeating Pinochet “wasn’t reality.” Yet “a good movie is always a good lie,” Mr. Larraín said with an admirable lack of exasperation, echoing Oscar Wilde’s observation that “the object of art is not simple truth, but complex beauty.” As far as Mr. Larraín is concerned, “No” doesn’t belong to either side. “It has its own space, and I’m glad.” MANOHLA DARGIS (NY Times)
