[In Pablo Larrains new film the villain is not a fictional one. He
is General Augusto Pinochet, the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictator
who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and died in 2006 still with the
blood of thousands on his hands. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE BLOOD IS EVERYWHERE IN PABLO LARRAÍN’S MESMERIZING EL CONDE  
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Bilge Ebiri
August 31, 2023
Vulture
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_ In Pablo Larrain's new film the villain is not a fictional one. He
is General Augusto Pinochet, the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictator
who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and died in 2006 still with the
blood of thousands on his hands. _

El Conde, El Conde Movie Poster, Netflix

 

A dark, caped figure glides through the night skies above Santiago,
Chile — a symbol of eternal portent hovering over the modern city.
It slips into office buildings, factories, hospitals, and apartments,
and brutally feeds on the lonely inhabitants within. This villain,
however, is not a fictional one. He is General Augusto Pinochet, the
brutal, U.S.-backed military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to
1990 and died in 2006 still with the blood of thousands on his hands.
Only in _El Conde_, Pablo Larraín’s mesmerizing, stomach-turning
tragicomic melodrama-horror movie, Pinochet never actually died; he
was an immortal vampire and faked his death so that he could avoid
prosecution and live out his life in peace on a remote ranch,
subsisting on nutritious smoothies made of human hearts and sitting on
the vast fortune he amassed during his reign of terror.

 
That’s not even the craziest element in Larraín’s movie, which is
premiering in Venice this week. (The film will then have a limited
theatrical release September 8th, before premiering globally on
Netflix September 15, just four days after the 50th anniversary of the
September 11, 1973 military coup that brought Pinochet to power.) Shot
by Edward Lachman in ravishing, _Andrei Rublev_–esque
black-and-white, _El Conde_ surely deserves to be seen on a big
screen — but it’s also fun to imagine this piece of agitprop
provocation just appearing on the screens of millions of people across
the world. It might be the most perverse project Netflix has ever
signed off on.

Larraín’s Pinochet is actually a Frenchman born to unknown parents
in 18th-century France. Via a brisk, outrageous montage, the director
presents the backstory of this beast: Carousing the night and feeding
on prostitutes, Claude Pinoche (as he is known then) dedicates himself
to the French king. After witnessing the execution of Marie
Antoinette, he gives the blood on her guillotine a good lick, absconds
with her severed head, and makes off for distant lands, eventually
finding himself a rising military star in Chile, in his snide eyes
“a land of fatherless peasants” ready for a brutal daddy figure to
seize control.

In the film’s present, Pinochet is ancient and doddering (albeit
given a snakelike allure by the actor Jaime Vadell), but he still
longs for the fresh, rich necks of the young, and he thinks fondly of
the days when he feasted on the blood of Imperial France and Britain.
Larraín thus suggests a kind of law of the conservation of evil: Like
matter, it’s never really destroyed. It transforms and
transmogrifies. A wicked brute dedicated to the king and queen of
France isn’t vanquished by the Revolution; he merely reinvents
himself in other lands. As _El Conde_ proceeds, we understand just
how much Larraín has committed to this idea — the film has a couple
of late twists that send both its narrative and its politics in
delightfully bonkers directions.

The film is also something of a comic family melodrama, believe it or
not. Pinochet’s children have converged on his home, worried as they
are about the state of their inheritance. Also arriving is Sister
Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), a beautiful young nun with a head for
numbers, there to calculate the extent of Pinochet’s riches. Carmen
also happens to be an exorcist, but her exorcisms are as much
financial as they are spiritual. With a seductive, disarming smile,
she interrogates the whole Pinochet family and gets them to reveal all
their many misdeeds and petty grievances.

The idea of a politician as a vampire isn’t new. In his 2008
film _Il Divo_, Paolo Sorrentino portrayed the controversial Italian
politician Giulio Andreotti also as a kind of vampire, a silent,
ageless figure living in a world of elegant shadows. Larraín goes
much further. He embraces genre, and he embraces gore. The blood is
everywhere — collecting on floors, leaving thick streaks, dripping
down cheeks and chins. The film’s finale is practically a miasma of
beheadings. The director doesn’t play coy with any of this stuff.
He’s not afraid to find beauty and thrills in this monstrous story
he’s concocted about the people who raped his country, because he
knows that he has to seize our attention and keep it.

In recent years, Larraín’s profile has risen thanks to his
star-driven portraits of women such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
(_Jackie_) and Lady Diana (_Spencer_). _El Conde_ would, at first,
seem like a radical departure from that type of subject matter and a
return to fanciful, genre-inflected political portraits such
as _Neruda_. But in truth, it’s all part of the same
continuum. _Jackie_ and _Spencer_ might not seem like overtly
political films, but they’re testaments to the fact that the closer
one gets to the centers of power, the more sublimated that power
becomes, the more embedded in ritual, morality, and behavior. The
so-called western democracies of the U.S. and the U.K. are calm,
hermetically sealed worlds. It’s in the far edges of empire that the
real carnage happens, and _El Conde_ presents Chile as a land
distant and alien to both Pinochet and the forces that literally
spawned him, making it an anonymous feeding ground for the ravages of
unchecked capitalism and kleptocracy. Beneath all the genre theatrics,
what comes through most vividly in _El Conde_ are Larraín’s
sadness and rage at what happened to his country. Anyway, it’ll be
on Netflix in a couple of weeks. Enjoy.

EL CONDE  WILL  HAVE A LIMITED THEATRICAL RELEASE SEPTEMBER 8TH,
BEFORE PREMIERING GLOBALLY ON NETFLIX SEPTEMBER 15, JUST FOUR DAYS
AFTER THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SEPTEMBER 11, 1973 MILITARY COUP
THAT BROUGHT PINOCHET TO POWER.

* Film
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* Film Review
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* El Conde
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* Pablo Larrain
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* Chile
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* Augusto Pinochet
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