‘Chile ’76’ Review: A Thrillingly Intimate Take on the Pinochet Regime’s Reign of Terror

To title your film after a year, as actor-turned-filmmaker Manuela Martelli does, is a bold statement. For Chileans, after all, 1976 (renamed Chile 76 for North American markets) will conjure up a host of reactions tied to what was one of the bloodiest years of Augusto Pinochets dictatorship. And yet this dazzling debut feature is grounded not in the resistance movement against Pinochet, nor on the political maneuvring that led to thousands having been disappeared. It focuses instead on a housewifes day-to-day routine, as she slowly finds her insular world rocked by events that soon spiral out of her control. Following a successful festival run beginning at Cannes last year, the film will be released Stateside by Kino Lorber from May 5.

Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim) leads an intentionally sheltered life. When we first meet her shes most concerned with getting the right shade of pink for the summer house renovation shes overseeing in the middle of Chiles winter months. She wants it just so, even bringing along a travelog where painterly sunsets and exotic landscapes provide mood-board inspirations for the blue-ish tone shes hoping to achieve. Martelli introduces us to Carmen in fussy voiceover, eventually letting the camera rest on the paint being mixed and, crucially, on a close-up of her dark blue shoe as drops of pink fall in slow motion.

Such a privileged inconvenience is further scored by the screams of a woman right outside the shop. As they fill the air, it becomes clear no one is helping her: Shes presumably hauled away by unseen and unnamed men.Juxtaposing Carmens frivolity with the very real, if tacitly ignored, violence inflicted by the Pinochet regime on Chiles resistance, this opening scene informs how Martelli approaches the year for which her film is titled.

This well-to-do woman may not bat an eyelid when such screams mildly disrupt her errands, but when a priest requests that she help care for a wounded man, she soon realizes her discomfort with looking the other way. In essence, Chile 76 is the story of how radicalization can take root even in the unlikeliest of places. As Carmen finds herself further helping the priest and the young man, she discovers a larger network of folks eager to push back against Pinochets craven politics.

Martelli, who co-wrote the script with Alejandra Moffat (The Wolf House), has a particular knack for creating suspense in the most mundane of scenarios. An eerie air of paranoia takes over the second half of Chile 76, arising from Carmens increasing inability to experience her normal life without fear and suspicion. Pointed asides by house guests become warnings hard to unhear, while strangers on the street become threats impossible to ignore. This may be the films most masterful achievement: Carmens life doesnt materially change all that much, yet its very tenor is forever altered.

Martelli hews so closely to this womans conservative, carefully curated world of lavish kids birthday parties and vanity-driven renovations that the repercussions of Pinochets hardened policies whispers of disappeared men and women, hushed calls for antidemocratic power can only ever be felt on the edges of upper-middle-class life. Yet once you see it, as Carmen does, nothing is the same. Camila Mercadals razor-sharp editing and Mara Portugals minimalist synth score further establish an unsettling atmosphere that starts to infect the everyday.

Chile 76 thus represents a different proposition from most period pieces about this dark era of Chilean history. That Carmen only becomes begrudgingly radicalized is conveyed in Kuppenheims captivating performance, which carries a wealth of budding realizations best limited to impassive gestures, lest they reveal her own misgivings and increasingly dangerous alliances. But the shift is presented in a way that feels almost inevitable, if only because its driven by a deeply personal sense of empathy and compassion. At every turn, Carmen makes decisions based on purely personal and site-specific circumstances, yet toward the end, she cant even enjoy daily errands without feeling the weight of whats happening around her. This bourgeois housewife cannot shake off the sense that to live the life she used to live is a form of complicity with the regime.

Martellis threading of the personal and the political doesnt just splinter Carmens story out into her countrys history, but formally toys with genre expectations. What begins as a muted marital melodrama slowly boils into a restrained political thriller, with an ease and skill all the more impressive in a first feature.