EL CONDE*****

Pablo Larrain returns to our screens after the histrionic and only partly successful Princess Diana biopic SPENCER with his mordantly black political satire about the Chilean director Augusto Pinochet, EL CONDE. Larrain has often covered the long shadow of Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship, not least in his brilliantly political comedy NO. But this film is darker, nastier and more challenging, if something of a one-trick pony. The big concept of this film is that Pinochet is reimagined as a vampire who first stirred up shit in the French revolution, before seizing power in a military coup in Chile, fifty years ago.  In Larrain's hilarious fantasy, Pinochet faked his own death in the mid 2010s, but now wants to actually die, leaving his avaricious wife and children with a logistical and financial issue.  So they bring in an accountant slash nun to both exorcise Pinochet so that he can be killed, but also to track down his hidden fortune. 

The question this film raises is where evil resides. Can it be isolated to Satan? To a single power- (and blood-) hungry general? To the soldiers that carried out his terror? To the businessmen and family members that grew rich in his regime? To the Catholic Church rich on ill-gotten donations? To the foreign political powers who supported his coups?  To the country, England, that had benefited from his military intelligence in the Falklands war?

As an ardent Thatcherite I might object at Stella Gonet's portrayal of Thatcher as a fellow blood-sucking political player, but that would to ludicrously miss the point. Thatcher DID admire Pinochet's fight against Communism and acknowledge Chile's help in the war. That realpolitik may not sit well with the British public but it's a truth we have to reckon with, just as Chile has to reckon with Pinochet's legacy in their own country.  The film uses provocative dark humour to rightly leave us all uncomfortable at our own complicity.

So kudos to Larrain and writer Guillermo Calderon for creating a deeply unsafe but also hilarious vampire movie, as provocative in its depiction of vampires and religion as Park Chan Wook's THIRST. But also a film that at root is a fucked-up five-person love story - the sexual and financial jealousy runs deep between Marie-Antoinette, Margaret Thatcher, Pinochet, his wife and his valet. Yep.  That's the kind of film this is.

Elsewhere, praise for cinematographer Ed Lachman (CAROL) for his stunning black and white photography, and to the actors Jaime Vadell (Pinochet), Paula Luchsinger (the nun), Gloria Muenchmeyer (Pinochet's wife) and a scene-stealing turn by Alfredo Castro as the valet.

EL CONDE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and Telluride 2023, went on limited cinematic release last week, and is on Netflix this week.

SPENCER*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 2

No film by Pablo Larrain can be a complete disaster. He's just too bloody talented. And his tale of Princess Diana's final Christmas inside the Royal Family is beautifully shot by DP Claire Mathon (PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE) in a manner reminiscent of Barry Lyndon - ethereal misty cool landscapes and warmly luscious interiors hiding a gothic horror. The framing is deliberate and intense - close-ups of Diana's quivering face - tracking shots that move with her in and out of rooms in which she is alienated and trapped -  tableaux held for longer than is comfortable.  Moreover, Larrain's film is scored by Jonny Greenwood (THERE WILL BE BLOOD) in glorious eclectic discordant cool jazz, classical piano and 80s pop kitsch, contributing to one of the most impressively intricate sound designs I've heard in years. 

In front of the lens, the supporting cast is strong throughout. I particularly loved Timothy Spall as a kind of austere Danvers-ish equerry who allows Larrain to show the full froideur of the institution, without actually having a go at Her Maj or Pricne Charles (Stella Gonet and Jack Farthing - used very sparingly indeed). And in the title role, this film hosts a career-best performance from Kristen Stewart, whose fragility and vulnerability is used to devastating effect. As a portrait of a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown, bulimia, suicidal ideation and paranoid delusion, it's a heartbreaking and powerful film.

But for me, as a film about Diana Spencer, this film is a failure.  And that is predominantly because of choices made by Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight (the pisspoor SERENITY).  I found their screenplay heavy-handed to the point of absurdity.  In an opening sequence, Diana is lost. Lost! "Where am I?" she asks bewildered peasants. Where is she indeed. "Do you think they will kill me?"  Whatever can you mean?! Throughout the film she has visions of Anne Boleyn. A cheap trick made even cheaper by a sequence where we see Diana in full tudor kit running through the house. And curiously miscast since Anne Boleyn was most famously the "other woman" rather than the "wronged woman" - in other words, more Camilla than Diana. And then the mawkish near final scene, where Diana's beloved dresser (Sally Hawkins - so talented she almost sells it) leaves her a note saying "it's not just me that loves you".  This film hangs heavy with portents of Diana's death and the mass hysteria that followed.

It's also odd to have Diana hanker after her childhood home as a safe place full of memories of dancing and laughter and sun-dappled gardens.  Diana had a notoriously miserable childhood, with a mother who abandoned her and a father who then remarried someone Diana painted as a wicked stepmother.  And far from being a boarded up gothic manor, the house was very much alive, being renovated by her stepmother in the bourgeois comfort that Diana claims to crave in this film, but decried in real life.

Finally, when contemplating this film compared to Larrain's magisterial JACKIE I wondered if the problem was simply that Diana isn't as interesting as Jackie Kennedy. She was basically a fragile, pretty, but rather thick woman who was almost perfectly incompatible with the institution she married into. It's a sad bad marriage but nothing more. By contrast, in JACKIE we have REAL narrative tension and REAL history being made. Jackie is a smart manipulative woman who wants to create the first draft of history as the myth of Camelot in opposition to the new LBJ White House and then Billy Crudup's journalist. There is no real narrative tension in DIANA.  Just a woman trapped for a 2 hour running time, looking beautiful and skewered. 

SPENCER is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. SPENCER played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA and UK on November 5th.