Everyone knows that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died in December 2006 at the age of 91, more than 30 years after seizing power from Salvador Allende in a coup d'état that was followed by censorship, torture, mass internments and disappearances. forced into the capital. pleasure of an unelected regime that drained the country of its vitality for generations to come. What the cheeky and grotesque “El Conde” (or “El Conde”) by Pablo Larraín presupposes is… what if he didn't?
Addressing directly a figure whose dark shadow has skirted some of the director's previous works (specifically "No," "Post Mortem" and "Tony Manero"), this fanged satire on the persistence of evil imagines that Pinochet is still alive and kicking Or, more accurately: undead and hating them. In Larraín's conception, Pinochet is a 250-year-old vampire who first developed his bloodlust during the French Revolution, during which he so fetishized Marie Antoinette's indifference toward the common man that he stole the queen's head and licked it. the blood of the guillotine. which served to cut it off. From that point on, he traveled the world and fed on oppression wherever he could find it, eventually settling in Chile – “a country without a king” – when it came time to orchestrate his own suffering.
Cold and darkly funny (most of the film's humor comes from his cruelty), “The Count” is heavy on premises and light on plot. This is the kind of high-concept historical piece that squeezes as much as it can out of a single idea; the kind of wild and energetic "what if?" who invariably enjoys laying the foundation for his story more than placing anything substantial on top of it. Things happen, particularly when the Catholic Church sends a nubile young nun (Paula Luchsinger) to Pinochet's isolated ranch (part shepherd's ranch, part Hitler-style bunker) to drive a stake through the heart of Chile's biggest monster, but the worst part of the film centers on the former dictator as he mopes about the house and laments his own immortality. As Dracula sang in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”: “he Die, die, die… I can't”.
Set in 2023, but filmed by Ed Lachman in a brilliant, timeless black and white that reflects both Pinochet's immortality and his denial, "The Count" suggests that it's hard to live in a world where the history books already hate you. . When it begins, Pinochet has lost the will to leave our collective memory of him behind, a fact that sickens the film's sympathetic narrator, whose identity, eagerly revealed during the third act, is as obvious from the start as it is hilariously bleak. in the end.
Played by Larraín regular Jaime Vadell, an 87-year-old actor whose agile performance impeccably splits the difference between a decrepit old man who relies on his walker and a dangerous demon who can still get up to get a hot piece of meat (“ "I will ride you like a bandit's horse!" he shouts to his interested wife Lucía, played by Gloria Münchmeyer, on the other side of a country dining room), Pinochet spends his days complaining to anyone who will listen about the injustices he has suffered since leaving office. . It's okay to be remembered as a murderer, but he can't stand the fact that people think of him as a thief.
In fact, the proud fascist is so fed up with all that shit that he's lost his appetite for drinking people dry, which explains why his body has turned into a shriveled husk in recent months. He can no longer afford to fly around Santiago like some kind of evil Superman and eat up the city's workers and progressive youth, and he doesn't seem to care that his loyal butler Fyodor (Alfredo Castro) is still with his wife. .
When his five adult children show up at the house en masse to claim his inheritance, Pinochet barely bats an eye at the irony that his own offspring, whom he refuses to bite, have been turned into vampires. anyway. Larraín and Guillermo Calderón's script is only too happy to take over, as "The Count" enjoys attention worthy of a feast with a serious and comic observation of a pork rib, and its characters are too vague to support the plot “Succession” type secondary in which Pinochet's children argue over the keys to their father's chalet in Aspen and what is the best way to divide the money in the bank accounts that financed September 11 (a date that has a different connotation, although equally tragic, in Chile).
Watch El Conde 2023 Movie Trailer
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