Talking Movies: Pablo Larrain’s No

During the run-up to the Iraq war, there was a popular bumper sticker which satirized the idea of Iraqi elections. It showed an imaginary Iraqi ballot with two voting options. Option one said “I vote for Saddam Hussein;” option two said “Please arrest me and torture my family.”

Chilean voters in 1988 may have felt that their options were similarly limited. Pablo Larrain’s No—Chile’s entry to the best foreign film category at this February’s Oscars—tells the story of that country’s 1988 referendum on whether dictator Augusto Pinochet would remain in power for another eight years, or if Chile would opt to hold open elections to install a new government.

It is surely a symptom of the perversity of superpower foreign policy during the Cold War that, after the U.S. government had helped to create the Pinochet regime and then propped it up for 15 years, it decided to throw its political and economic weight behind the nation-wide referendum. Despite U.S. assistance in the effort to secure a ‘no’ vote, however, the movie’s protagonist—advertising man Rene Saavedra who is leading the “No” campaign—has his hands full. Since, in a Latin American military dictatorship, nationwide elections can be conducted in less than a year and a half, Saavedra and his team must come up with a strategy, create a campaign and deliver the message within a period of just a few weeks. Add to this the very real tension of whether the regime will even go along with the legitimate outcome of this vote, and the associated threats to the family members of those working on the campaign, and you end up with something like Mad Men meets The Year of Living Dangerously or, more ominously, The Killing Fields.

Political movies made in the U.S. these days seem to sort themselves into a few categories. First are the heroic tales of accomplishment against past social barriers, which have been heroically transcended: 42—The Jackie Robinson Story awaits summer audiences. Second are the tortured but, ultimately, enlightening stories of historical reconceptualization: The saga of Lincoln’s presidency has already been re-told to us by an Irishman. More recent is the worship of the heroic and unaccountable clandestine services, sometimes aided by the film industry itself: securing the freedom of erstwhile hostages in the Iran of 1979 in Ben Affleck’s Argo, and the somewhat more shadowy exploits of the Navy Seals in Zero Dark Thirty. All these are worthwhile, though maybe somewhat narcissistic, endeavors of political filmmaking. But where are the political films that can do it all—that can give viewers a compelling narrative, interesting characters and a reasonably objective view of actual historical circumstances? Alas, we may have to look abroad (again) to a tragic but profound political situation that the U.S. government—spoiler alert—helped to create. At a time when G.I. Joe Retaliation shows at not one, but ALL of the Marcus Theaters in Iowa City, perhaps the Chileans can teach us something.

The C.I.A. must count as some sort of victory the fact that the campaign to vote out Pinochet comes off more as advertising than as revolution. Saavedra, played by Gael García Bernal, insists on this approach from the beginning: Portraying the evils of Pinochet will only convince people to be afraid of those evils, but portraying the alternative as better will more certainly win the day.

Bernal’s character does not exactly come off as the Chilean Don Draper, but his creative process has some of the same approach (minus the heavy drinking). He has the rather daunting assignment of convincing Chileans to do something which their own government has told them is wrong, unpatriotic and potentially dangerous. He goes about this not by pointing out the injustices, corruption and human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime, but by essentially making democracy look fun.

http://youtu.be/DJ1v55-ocIo

The film’s story is told in a sort of pastiche, comprised of family drama, crowd shots of political rallies and snippets of the ads themselves. While it shares some of Argo’s self-congratulatory theme that the cinema industrial complex in some indirect way can promote meaningful freedom, No is much more about how film sells itself: that the packaging of the media message is sometimes just as important as the truths it reveals.

American politics, in its own expensive and indirect way, similarly forces a choice between ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in most of its national elections: Is it ‘morning in America’ or four more years of the same old thing? At the very time that Chileans were being asked to make a life-altering choice between the continuation of a military dictatorship or the prospect of an untested, potentially disastrous democratic future, American voters were being given the infamous Willie Horton ad campaign and embarrassing pictures of Michael Dukakis trying to see over the hood of an Abrams tank.

Pablo Larrain‘s movie reminds us that the two political approaches are maybe not that far apart. In both countries the message is mediated by the inelegant chicanery of the sales pitch, but we can’t help but feel that the posturing in our case is both more resource-intensive, and at the same time, somehow less stark. A revolution, as Mao Zedong famously remarked, is not a dinner party. It may, however, be a movie, screenplay or television campaign.

For American audiences at least, Pablo Larrain’s No forces us to ask why we have been wasting all those advertising dollars on Super Bowl beer commercials rather than on more profound issues. In Chile’s case, these are issues of life or death.

No plays at the Bijou May 1-2.

Warren Sprouse teaches high school in Cedar Rapids. He sends his sympathies to the Cuban national baseball team.