AT THE MOVIES

With

David Begelman

“No” and “Yes:” Manicuring History in Film

When it comes to ruthless dictators, Augusto Pinochet of Chile is among the best of them. As the central schemer in the plot to oust the democratically elected president, Salvatore Allende, in 1973, he was among a conniving entourage in a military junta that staged one of the more squalid coup d’états of the last half century. His record of political dislocation, brutality and murder reportedly embraced killing up to 3,000 citizens, interning 80,000 of his countrymen, exiling over 1,300, and torturing over 30,000, including women and children. Quite a legacy.

A later commission unearthed information about an additional 9,800 victims, bringing the total number of victims of Pinochet to over 40,000. Were not that enough, the new military machine, in cooperation with Operation Condor, a consortium of Latin American intelligence agencies, pursued exiles it deemed a threat to the new order, leaving behind them a trail of assassinations.

With a not so invisible helping hand from operatives in the American State Department (the name of one key player begins with “K”), the justification for the carnage was, naturally, to save Chile from Communist infiltration. The all too convenient character of such an alibi was not lost on César Mendoza, a member of the junta from the beginning. He resigned, rather than risk identification with the atrocities, including the murder of three Communist Party members. If all’s fair in love and war, Pinochet could have taught Scientologists a lesson in how to treat anyone who’s “fair game!”

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s 2012 film “No,” based upon an unpublished play by Antonio Skármeta, is, from a sheerly technical standpoint, a work of brilliance. To achieve a documentary effect of Chilean politics during a transitional political phase of the country, Larrain made use of a low definition Sony magnetic tape, so that actual footage of real military and civilian clashes of the era were spliced side by side with the simulated action of performers. These include Gael Garcia Bernal as publicist René Saavedra.

Yet within the compass of the entire Chilean political landscape, “No” is a bit of a disappointment or, rather, a scaled down representation of the turmoil that beset its citizenry during the tempestuous years of the Pinochet regime.

Larrain opts for depicting a less turbulent transition from tyranny to democracy by dealing only with a tamer side of how the dictator finally conceded. This was only after all the dirty water—and dirty is too clean a word to describe Pinochet’s tenure—flowed under the bridge for 15 years. The film embraces a picture of Chile distinguished by what it leaves out, rather than what it depicts.

It deals largely with separate publicity campaigns of opposing factions, as though the despised dictator were nothing more than your run-of-the-mill politician who, in the usual phony gesture of humility that characterizes his ilk, agrees to step down in the face of contrary 1988 election results. There are, naturally, scenes of his thugs before election results beating or hosing women and children, but these are scarce. The film pretty much devotes itself to the publicity campaigns of “Yes” voters (Pinochet) and a coalition of “No” voters who are opting for a new order of things. That the latter prevail is good news any way you look at it. But considering Chilean history through such a shortsighted lens has to be a sin of omission of the highest order.

“No” won an award at the Cannes Film Festival, the Chilean entry at the 85^th Academy Awards, while Bernal won the 2012 award for Best Actor at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Meanwhile, just like Allende, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda’s body is being exhumed, due to questions surrounding his death. Neruda was critical of Pinochet, and while the cause of his death was officially listed as prostate cancer, his political allies have been suspicious about the real reasons for his demise.

As if we hadn’t guessed it already.