Chile's Troubled Conscience through the Cinema of Pablo Larrain
TONY MANERO - NETWORKPablo Larraín’s newest feature, Ema, was released online in an exclusive streaming engagement on MUBI. Although it has been consistently praised for Mariana Di Girolamo’s unhinged performance, an overall hypnotic tone and its bold colour palette, the film’s narrative sphere seems to have divided the critical opinion. Some feel at home with its intangible symbolism and apparent multidimensionality of interpretations one could apply to the narrative, while others see Ema as an exercise in self-aggrandisement. This possibly wouldn’t be the case if general audiences knew Larraín’s work a bit better.
Over the course of the last fourteen years, Pablo Larraín has directed eight movies, most of them in his home country of Chile. His only non-Chilean film, Jackie, is thus likely his most well-known feature. This is a bit unfortunate because – thematically speaking – it is a bit of an oddball in his catalogue. While it is a great illustration of Larraín’s austere visual style, marrying influences drawn from Stanley Kubrick and Michael Haneke, this unorthodox biopic of Jackie Kennedy revolving around a towering performance by Natalie Portman isn’t the best example of Larraín’s thematic interests. To identify them, one has to look back at his earlier efforts.
Already in his 2006 debut, Fuga, Pablo Larraín was letting his audiences know he wasn’t interested in holding anyone’s hand. He expected a certain level of engagement from the viewer, which is perhaps why he was more likely to endear critics rather than anybody else. However, this doesn’t change the fact the film wasn’t inherently interesting. This narratively convoluted duplex of stories about a young composer, who poured his traumatic childhood memories into a ‘cursed’ rhapsody and went insane in the process, and a student, who years later plagiarized his music, was artistically accomplished and intellectually stimulating. It also hinted at Larraín’s interest in exploring how humans deal with their past, how they process shame, guilt and trauma and – most importantly – how their perception of the world and overall existence is warped by extreme circumstances. Larraín’s later works eventually revealed this obsession to be connected to the history of Chile and, more specifically, to the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror. These anxieties channelled in Fuga were perhaps an allegorical stand-in or a projection of the way he felt about his country. It somehow makes sense to relate Eliseo’s insanity derived from witnessing his sister’s rape and murder to a historical memory of Chile being taken over by evil forces.
Even though the filmmaker was born in 1976, when Pinochet was still in power, the bulk of his formative experiences fell in the era that came directly after he stepped down. Thus, Larraín’s upbringing was inadvertently informed – or tainted – with the knowledge of his country very recent and extremely dark past. He grew up listening to stories about police brutality, disappearances, suppression of free speech and a general atmosphere of fear that accompanied the life under a totalitarian jackboot. These tactile memories and projections ended up reflected in his movies. Consequently, it isn’t unrealistic to see Fuga as a quasi-autobiographical parable disguising the filmmaker’s angst using elaborate symbolism.
His next three films – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No – dealt with these demons more directly. They are sometimes grouped together as a thematic trilogy, as they are set during the Pinochet era, though only the first two bear enough similarities to be seen as related to one another. In Tony Manero, Larraín takes a viscerally-affecting and visually provocative look at how the dystopian reality of living in a totalitarian state encourages and fosters sociopathic behaviour as a tool for survival. The story follows a disturbed individual, Raul (Alfredo Castro, one of Larraín’s stalwarts), who is obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. However, as the camera hangs on Raul’s shoulder and details his deranged pursuit to enter a TV contest for the best Tony Manero lookalike, Larraín introduces the viewer to the world of Pinochet’s Chile and comments on its harsh characteristics. Suffice it to say that he pulls no punches in doing so either, which is a trait he would remain married to throughout his career. The film is violent, graphic and unnerving, but it is nevertheless successful in conveying an utterly frightening notion that such terrible times of terror somehow reward antisocial tendencies and emotional detachment.
These ideas are explored further and from a slightly adjusted angle in Post Mortem, a tale about a forensic pathologist Mario (Alfredo Castro), set during the 1973 military coup that saw Pinochet’s rise to power, accompanied by widespread purges of political opponents. Again, Larraín uses a disturbed individual as a vehicle to channel his frustrations with Chile’s brutal history and suggests that society-wide desensitization to violence and injustice was an unfortunate side effect of the country’s descent into totalitarian horror. In fact, Mario’s nearly catatonic detachment from reality is the very reason he is able to perform his professional duties. As a result, Post Mortem becomes an outlet for the filmmaker’s anger at Chile’s rapid societal descent and embracement of animalistic behaviour. Larraín was clearly disappointed with the realization that a civilized country built by seemingly good and honest people could abandon its humanity so easily and quickly.
His righteous exasperation can be felt just as heavily even in his more recent efforts, like The Club, which comments on the hypocritical tendencies of the Chilean Catholic Church. This story about a house in the middle of nowhere – where The Church exiles paedophile priests, political subversives and other undesirables – is just as furious as his earlier movies, despite not being immediately related to Pinochet’s legacy. Together, with his preceding efforts, it is a clear indication that Pablo Larraín’s cinema isn’t provocative for its own sake. He uses these allegorical stories about murderous sociopaths and deeply disturbed victims of abuse as a way of dealing with the ghosts of his country’s past he has internalized.
Interestingly, he hasn’t been fully consumed by these haunting anxieties and managed to imbue some of his movies with a more reflective tone. No is a much tamer yet effectively stylized experience recounting the events leading up to the historical referendum when Pinochet’s reign came to an end. Similarly, his 2016 Neruda deals with the strange mythology surrounding the life of Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet and revolutionary. It would seem that as Larraín was becoming more confident with his filmmaking form and more audacious in exploring visual symbolism, he may have toned down his rhetoric a notch. Though, this stylistic shift should not be seen as his edge being irreversibly blunted.
He still cares about continuing his thematic mission and Ema testifies to this effect. When viewed through the lens of Larraín’s previous movies, it becomes abundantly clear that this kaleidoscope of colours and visual symbolism is fundamentally related to his entire filmography. Just as Raul in Tony Manero and Mario in Post Mortem were avatars of Chile’s past, Ema – demented and unconventional as she may seem – symbolizes Chile’s aspiration to rid itself of its demons (the same demons Larraín has been studying his entire life). Therefore, it may be somewhat unproductive to fixate on the film’s stance about sexual fluidity or devise superficial comparisons to Climax, Suspiria or Marriage Story because, chances are, Pablo Larraín was predominantly interested in continuing his discussion about changes in Chile. After all, he has been doing it for the last fourteen years and there is absolutely no reason to assume he would stop now.
