Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Starring: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Catalina Guerra,
Marcial Tagle, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, Antonia Zegers
Dictators and unpopular political leaders have often been likened to
parasites sucking the blood from the veins of whatever nation they
happen to find themselves at the reins of. With
El Conde ("The Count"), Chilean director
Pablo Larraín takes this metaphor to its literal conclusion,
reimagining his country's infamous dictator, General Augusto Pinochet,
as a vampire.
In Larraín's version, Pinochet is born in France 250 years ago and
feeds off prostitutes before fleeing at the outbreak of the revolution,
taking Marie Antoinette's guillotined head as a souvenir. After
travelling around Europe he ends up in 21st century Chile (played by
Jaime Vadell), and the rest is history.
The real Pinochet died in 2006, but Larraín imagines that he fakes his
demise and carries on living on a remote island with his wife Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer) and Renfield-esque servant Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), hiding out
like the disgrace priests of Larraín's
The Club. When he gets thirsty, Pinochet takes nocturnal trips to the Santiago,
where he flies gracefully like Superman through the skyscrapers, seeking
out victims.
Learning that their father has finally decided to die, Pinochet's five
children head to the island hoping to get the most from his will. To
arrange the details, a nun/accountant, Carmen (Paula Luchsinger),
is brought to the island, but she may have ulterior motives.
Larraín's previous biopics of
Jackie Onassis,
Diana Spencer
and
Pablo Neruda
have been far from hagiographies, but the director really relishes
driving a stake into his country's most notorious leader here. Pinochet
is reduced to a pathetic figure, one who insists he had his country's
best interests at heart while fondly reminiscing of his days torturing
and executing anyone who happened to disagree with him. Larraín's
takedown of Pinochet might seem like plucking at low-hanging fruit, but
he counters his own opinion by having the film narrated by one of
Pinochet's most infamous allies, Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet), who speaks in glowing terms of her fellow vampire.
While Larraín certainly has plenty of scorn for Pinochet, he doesn't
appear to have much to say about the man. We're given no real insight into
what motivated his rise to power, or how he achieved it. We're left in
no doubt that a conventional biopic of the dictator would be more
dramatic than this collection of vampire clichés and Wikipedia
notes.
Larraín adopts the stance that his audience has never seen a vampire
movie before, and so we're fed the usual litany of rules and details of
how such creatures conduct themselves. There are no jokes here that you
won't have seen in decades old comedies like
Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Carry on Screaming or Love at First Bite, and Larraín and co-writer Guillermo Calderón run out of comic
material far too early to sustain the film's near two hour run
time.
Cracks really begin to appear with the arrival of Carmen, whose
interrogations of Pinochet and his family are used as a lazy way of
delivering a lecture on the history of the man and his brood. It's also
unclear what Carmen represents. She's a devout nun, but wasn't Pinochet
propped up, as so many of his ilk have been, by the church? Why then
would she have it in for him? The film draws heavily on Bram Stoker's
Dracula but can't decide if Carmen is Harker or Van Helsing.
El Conde is the first misstep in Larraín's prolific
career, but a movie made by a filmmaker of his talent is always going to
have at least one redeeming feature. Here it's the gorgeous vespertine
cinematography of Edward Lachman, who utilises the same lenses
employed by Gregg Toland in his collaborations with Orson Welles. If
only Larraín's deconstruction of Pinochet was a fraction as engaging as
Welles' thinly disguised takedown of William Randolph Hearst.
El Conde is ultimately little more than an arthouse cousin
of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
