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 Pinochet’s 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 housewife’s 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 she’s most concerned with getting the right shade of pink for the summer house renovation she’s overseeing in the middle of Chile’s 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 she’s 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.
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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: She’s presumably hauled away by unseen and unnamed men. Juxtaposing Carmen’s frivolity with the very real, if tacitly ignored, violence inflicted by the Pinochet regime on Chile’s 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 Pinochet’s 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 Carmen’s 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 film’s most masterful achievement: Carmen’s life doesn’t materially change all that much, yet its very tenor is forever altered.
Martelli hews so closely to this woman’s conservative, carefully curated world of lavish kid’s birthday parties and vanity-driven renovations that the repercussions of Pinochet’s 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 Mercadal’s razor-sharp editing and María Portugal’s 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 Kuppenheim’s 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 it’s 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 can’t even enjoy daily errands without feeling the weight of what’s 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.
Martelli’s threading of the personal and the political doesn’t just splinter Carmen’s story out into her country’s 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.
