POST MORTEM: PABLO LARRAINS CHILE TRILOGY Friday to Tuesday (February 19-23) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. tiff.net. Rating: NNNN
The films in TIFF Cinematheques Post Mortem: Pablo Larrains Chile Trilogy chart the nations descent into and emergence from Augusto Pinochets 17-year dictatorship of torture, abduction and repression through stories set largely on the periphery of the main event.
Larrain comes from an affluent family with ties to the regime, but this body of work is no apologia for the sins of the father. Rather, it illuminates a darkened past by way of perversion, putrescence and cynicism. At its most blackly humorous, Larrains cinema is more akin to Billy Wilders than Patricio Guzmans.
A show-biz underdog tale as imagined by Roberto Bolano, 2008s Tony Manero (Friday, 6:30 pm) follows a 52-year-old (the morbidly gifted Alfredo Castro) devoted to impersonating John Travoltas disco savant from Saturday Night Fever and winning a televised look-alike contest. The King Of Comedy under military curfew, Tony Manero quickly establishes its protagonist as a murderous sociopath willing to stomp anyone en route to dancing with the stars. The profoundly unnerving implication is that the pall of malfeasance ushered in by Pinochet gave tacit permission to enact evils that might have otherwise seemed unfathomable.
In 2010s Post Mortem (Saturday, 6:30 pm), Castro plays Mario, a pathologists assistant obsessed with a burlesque dancer. Their quasi-romance coincides with the military coup that ousted Salvador Allende, an event whose primary by-product was more corpses Allendes among them for Mario and his colleagues to assess. The abstruse central characters are defined by exaggerated emotional paralysis, while the neo-Gothic finale feels schematic.
Chronicling the 1988 plebiscite and the campaigns for and against maintaining Pinochets dictatorship, 2012s No (Tuesday, 6:15 pm) boasts an international star (Gael Garcia Bernal) and a happy ending and was rewarded with an Oscar nomination. A study in the politics of advertising and the advertising of politics, No is easily Larrains most widely appealing film. Its also very good: energized, fascinating and more ethically complex than its predecessors.
The Club, Larrains latest (opening for a limited run starting Friday, February 19), isnt part of the trilogy but could be regarded as its afterward, shifting focus only slightly from state to church.
Set at a sort of secret seaside retirement home for priests guilty of grotesque sins, the drama begins when a new arrival is accosted by one of his victims, who appears outside the home like a hounding ghost, reciting a litany of offences and ultimately driving his perpetrator to suicide. A younger priest is sent in to investigate the incident, minimize damage to the Church and quash the residents habitual gambling and boozing.
Characterized by creeping zooms and suspenseful scenes of confession, The Club is compellingly bleak but features sly twists that offer some surprising glimmers of justice. Given the Vaticans history of dodging accountability, this could almost be considered optimistic.
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