It sometimes seemed, in the long years of trials, deflections and evasions that comprised the last days of Chile’s murderous looter and dictator Augusto Pinochet, that the monstrous bastard would never die.
A “normalized” and “accepted” despot with a tidier media image in the U.S. and the UK than his true peers, Marcos, Franco, various Duvaliers and Battista, he must have seemed like a vampire as he evaded accountability for his coup, his crimes and his amassed stolen fortune.
Certainly Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain must have thought so. The director of “Jackie,” “Neruda” and “Spencer” branches out from revealing bio-pics for “El Conde,” an often beautiful but always dry and slow motion black and white tirade about the fascist dictator he and his countrymen grew up under.
“El Conde” — the title was from the “Captain General’s” preferred mode of address “in private,” “the Count” (Maybe he WAS a vampire!)– sets up as a “Death and the Maiden” reckoning for an evil-doer, an “Interview with the Vampire” interrogation for an old immortal who has faked his death as he murdered his way from 18th century France to Russia, Haiti, Algeria and Chile. It plays out as somewhat less focused than that, and a lot more frustrating.
Pinochet’s great hidden wealth seems lost. His five reviled, avaricious children join him and his “dwarvish, hateful” wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra) on an island estate, presided over by the vampire’s aide de camp, the “White Russian” Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), “a Cossack forged from vodka and steel,” as El Conde (Jaime Vadell) waits for help doing something he’s avoided for centuries — dying.
His friends at the Catholic church provide him with a winsome young nun (Paula Luchsinger) to research his financials and “exorcise” him so that he can at long last die.
She smiles coyly and speaks to him in French, “the language of treason,” he calls it, from his days in Revolutionary France. Sister Carmen asks him about “the murder and disappearance of thousands of children” between queries about looted money and assetts hidden in plain sight in Britain, the U.S., and elsehwere, “sales” of Chile’s industry and patrimony to him or his vile (but not vampire) offspring.
And as The Count and his wife swan about in minks, the young nun prays and prepares to chase away the demon so that the hijo de puta can be removed from the human race.
Larrain’s film, mostly in Spanish but endlessly-narrated in British English, has lovely images from the moors and tundra of Chila, and the flying sequences here as the Count and his bitten minions set out “hunting” are almost breathtaking.
Great conceit, seeing the always caped and military-capped Captain General as Dracula in a military uniform.
But the middle acts are consumed with laundry lists of Pinochet and his (sometimes foreign) enabler’s sins, crimes for which Larrain has much zeal for bringing up and none for resolving.
The endless narration is mostly here for layering insults on everyone attached to Pinochet, for explaining and over-explaining the exposition that never seems to end. Once we’ve gotten the “joke,” that the vampire was born in France and used to lick the guillotine after executions during the Revolution and ended his days as a blood-thirsty fascist dictator, focusing on what is known about his regime and pecadillos by showing us is always better than having a narrator explain it.
Yes waiting around to see who that Brit-accented narrator is worth one’s while. But Larrain’s polemic, giving us bare glimpses of the man’s crimes and wallowing in whether this blood or that heart is “old” or “young” and thus more nutricious for vampires adds nothing to the experience.
Larrain takes Netflix money to ensure “El Conde” has striking images, but no tasty “acting” moments. It’s an allegory that works but never quite scores a knock-out blow and a satiric thriller that manages a lot of still-angry name-calling but little sense that this will ever be enough.
Rating: R, violence, sex
Cast: Jaime Vadell, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger and Alfredo Castro
Cast: Directed by Pablo Larrain, scripted by Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larrain. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:51
You have a little sense that this will ever be enough. Here was never proper justice, like was in Germany, where’s Nazi’s ran away to South America, here justice was a masquerade, people from the COUP still are part of our elite watching carefully not to loose their privileges. The actress that plays Lucia is Gloria Münchmeyer, Catalina’s mother. It’s true, its not a film based on adrenalina or special effect, but Pablo’s work is brilliant, better you give another couple of stars.
I have a Chilean friend who mourns that Sept. anniversary every year. I get it. Some were oppressed, some barely bothered or inconvenienced by what the society lost.