First approach I had with Pablo Larrain’s cinema was with the movie No, nominated for an Academy Award in 2012 and starring Gael García Bernal. I have to admit that by this time I wasn’t fully aware of who Augusto Pinochet was, and what was presented to me was simply overwhelming: the reality that a country lived, but also the premise of a distinct Latin American cinema of profound historical reflection of its context.

Latin American cinema has become a reference around the world, succeeding in differentiating through a raw and honest speech about its cultural and social realities. Perhaps, it’s not looking to impose itself as a dogma of thought, like The Cinema of the Other Europe or the Hong Kong Cinema, but more rather like that small but important cinema coming from the Near East, just as Kiarostami’s cinema that we worked on before. Latin American cinema, being the periphery of the most important international film production system, Hollywood, has become influenced in its own way, but has been rebellious in its forms.

It seems that in this constant search of identity, Latin American cinema, and in this case Larrain’s cinema, the director to analyze in this occasion, proposes to be direct and voracious with our political and social truthness in what characterizes our countries so much like it is our vast history of Dictatorships; for it not to be forgotten, no matter the time.

Post-dictatorship Cinema: A new era.

During the almost two decades of Pinochet’s term (1974 – 1990) the whole country was censored. Some filmmakers were exiled, others dedicated to advertising; those were moments of a lot of silence in Chile. It’s not until 1989’s plebiscite, when Pinochet’s military regime falls, that filmmakers start looking for references to an immediate past. The 90’s and early 00’s films allude to dictatorship times and portray a diverse Chile, affected by totalitarianism and modernity. Chilean reality displayed a struggle between its past, devastating present and the future they wanted as a nation after so many years under the shadows.

The dictatorship would leave a lot of pain, rage and resentment in the heart of the Chilean people, like the case of Pablo Larraín, who’s born in the midst of the term, within a right-wing party family benefited by it; however, this doesn’t influence at all his films and he strongly rejects it.

“In Chile, the right-wing is a direct responsible, through Pinochet’s government, of what happened with the culture those years, not only with its elimination and non-propagation but, also, with the persecution of authors and artists”, Larraín declared to EFE Agency in 2008

Chile, after the dictatorship, turned itself into a country where the ghosts of those who were murdered, the pain and all the unpunished crimes continue to inhabit; all of that is reflected in Pablo Larrain’s filmography, as in many other Chilean directors (Andrés Wood, Patricio Guzmán), but, it would be specifically in his trilogy about Pinochet, with the films Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012), where Pablo Larrín would confront the dictatorship subject in cinema, making him one of the most renowned and important directors of his country and Latin America.

Dictatorship and Cinema

An overview of Pinochet’s dictatorship Trilogy

Tony Manero (2008)

The opening film for this trilogy is Tony Manero, premiered in 2008, it’s Larrain’s second film and introduce a fantastic but cruel discourse. Larrain’s first feature length, Fuga (2006), goes through that desperation of the Chilean cinema to tell things differently from the political conflicts that the country and the chileans were facing. Pretty energetic and well-made, but it has nothing to do with the distressing reality that Pablo would present to us in Tony Manero.

Raúl, an ordinary man, is looking to win a talent show by impersonating the mythic John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever: Tony Manero. The film develops in a 70’s Santiago where decadence, violence and repression by that moment are evident. In this movie, unlike the others that will be furtherly mentioned, we could see that, perhaps, The Dictatorship topic its treated in a subtler way; we know about it, we sense and intuit it with brief dialogues and glances between the characters, that is to say, these characters are not directly related to the dictatorship, but rather they are the result of it. Raúl lives in a boarding house with several people, all of them aspiring actors or dancers that have a little scenario where they present dancing shows or theatre plays in front of a little audience that clandestinely comes to see them and drink during curfews.

A clear example of the subtleness with which the dictatorship was treated in this film is in the scene when militaries arrive to the boarding house looking for a boy, as they start requisitioning the whole house, Raúl escapes, leaving behind his partners while they suffer from the abuses of the regime. A locked up, frightened and silenced country; as well as a vicious and unscrupulous society, is what Pablo Larraín’s introduce to us in the first feature of his trilogy. Culture stagnation in Chile during this historical period, flawlessly portrayed in this film, proves the regression that Chileans suffered in many aspects of their lives. As Larrín mentioned: “For almost twenty years Chile was unable to express itself from an artistic point of view”.

The cultural appropriation topic, or the imitation of idols, is taken in a very sordid way throughout the film. Achieving this impossible ideal take our main character to the extreme of committing murder to obtain an aspiration so distant as, precisely, being Tony Manero