When we first see Carmen (Küppenheim), the central figure of Manuela Martelli’s Chile ‘76, she is sitting at the rear of a hardware store, leafing through photographs in a dogeared travel guide to Italy. As she and the clerk finish mixing the paint of a Venetian sunset, a woman shrieks from the street outside, screaming that she’s being kidnapped. Tires screech, a car zooms away, and onlookers murmur while hurrying by. When Carmen approaches her car, she notices something underneath. It is a woman’s shoe. It is the woman’s shoe, and as Carmen uses her foot to turn it over, to examine it, she sees that drops of paint have fallen onto her own shoe. The metaphor of complicity seems evident. Has Carmen noticed that?
The economy of the film’s title should be enough to evoke a certain historical atmosphere. The violent, systemic suppression of thousands of political dissidents through murder and torture, the fear and suspicion that gripped all levels of society – in this, only the third year of Pinochet’s dictatorship – cast a pitch black shadow on the country. But that shadow hasn’t touched bourgeois housewife Carmen, whose doctor husband, Miguel (Goic), is currently on the right side of the government. Carmen and her housekeeper Estela (Martinez) are headed to the family’s vacation home on the coast to prepare for the winter holidays. Overseeing an interior pool renovation is a distraction, but Carmen’s diet of prescription pills and booze, chainsmoking and insomnia, makes clear her depression.
When the local parish priest asks her to tend to a young man, Elías (Sepúlveda), an injured petty thief recovering at his church, she agrees, having trained as a nurse in her youth. Elías is, of course, not a petty thief at all, but a political fugitive, a member of a communist guerilla cell whose mere presence in the church is a death sentence for everyone. Sparked perhaps by that discarded shoe, by her own stagnantly decorative life, she not only helps Elías recover, but begins actively aiding him, ferrying messages to his comrades, attempting to find him safe passage, and ultimately placing herself in situations that are not just a danger to her, but to her family as well.
What Martelli and her co-conspirators have created with the radicalization of Carmen in Chile ‘76 – and what, incidentally, eludes so many contemporary horror films – is the palpable sense of dread. The filmmakers have studied and utilized the methods of what is arguably the golden age of paranoid political thrillers: the Seventies (see: Marathon Man, Klute, The Conversation). Chile ‘76 fits right in with that particular brand of uneasy cinema, and not just because it shares the time period (that doesn’t hurt, though). The eerie tracking shots and surveilling POV camerawork by Soledad Rodríguez and Mariá Portugal’s creepily dissonant soundscapes induce a sustained tension that makes Carmen’s every move a potentially fatal one, whether it’s lying to a hospital nurse to get antibiotics, or realizing, possibly too late, that a rendezvous point has been compromised. Because all it takes is one misstep to bring it all down. Chile ‘76 never makes one.
This article appears in August 18 • 2023.