Since the turn of the century, the cinema of Chile has risen to international attention. Almost ten years after the return to democracy, the country’s complicated history began to be seen again in filmmaking as a way to reconcile with the past, and raise questions about the future. Almost 20 years after his debut film, Pablo Larraín stands as one of the most iconic figures of his country’s cinematic rise.
Both as director and producer, Larraín has been behind some of the most important moments in Chilean cinema. His production company has brought to life films by other great contemporary filmmakers like Sebastián Silva, Marialy Rivas, and Sebastián Lelio. Both him and his brother Juan De Dios Larraín served as producers for Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, the first Chilean film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
His directing credits include forays into various miniseries, and nine feature length films. Let’s see how they rate.
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9 Ema
Fabula
A highly-anticipated follow-up to the director’s two films released in 2016, the character study Ema finds Mariana Di Girolamo as the titular character, a dancer who sets a Machiavellian course of actions to get back what she lost, at any cost. It’s a delirious insight into modern love about a woman set on being unapologetically herself, never settling down, determined on making her world happen on her own terms.
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Ema herself is a trailblazing mess of rage and sex who will stop at nothing, until the world gives her the space she’s been long denied of just for being herself. A jab at Chile’s adoption system and social prejudices, Ema is at the same time an exploration of youth and new conventions regarding love and sex, a visual playground of plastic emotions, and an amoral view of a modern individual against an antiquated society.
8 Post Mortem
Pablo Larraín has never shied away from Chile’s history. A common theme through his filmography deals with Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, a dark time when Chilean society saw the dream of Salvador Allende (the first democratically elected Marxist in Latin American history, then couped by the military supported by the CIA) perish away, democracy fade into nothingness, and over three thousand lives lost.
Post Mortem, the director’s first delve into that era, fittingly develops in one of the places that are most associated with death: a morgue. Alfredo Castro stars as a pathologist’s assistant who searches for a disappeared burlesque dancer while the Military Junta informs them their top brass will attend an autopsy of a very important person whose cause of death must be ruled out as suicide. Bleakly shot in Russian LOMO anamorphic lenses in 16mm, the film looks as dark as the time it depicts.
7 Fuga
Network Distributing
In his directorial debut, Pablo Larraín displays a lot of the great qualities his future films will hold. Fuga showcases the director’s skill with actors and characters with deep psychological issues, smart writing in both dialogue and plot, and an overall commanding confidence to build a world that’s unique to the film but also to the context it belongs.
Fuga concerns obsession with music as both a beautiful distraction and a curse. It follows Eliseo, a composer who believes he might be killing his loved ones as people close to him begin to die, which ends up with him taken to a mental institution where music is his only escape.
6 Jackie
Fox Searchlight Pictures
In his first English-language film, Larraín helms a sober and psychologically driven account of Jacqueline Kennedy, days after the assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy. Jackie is carried by a poignant performance from Natalie Portman, gorgeous cinematography from Stéphane Fontaine, and the chilling atmospheres of Mica Levi’s score.
Jackie presents a woman on the most complicated week of her life, which she can’t spend alone because the whole world is watching and waiting on whatever she has to say. Visually cold and complicated, the film brings to life a much talked about chapter in American history through the eyes and emotional reality of the person who suffered it the most.
5 No
Sony Pictures
In 1990, Chile found its return to democracy. Two years prior to that, international pressure forced Augusto Pinochet to call a plebiscite on his government; the people of Chile would decide over a return to democracy or eight more years of totalitarian rule. No is the story of the advertising tactics used in the opposition campaign that helped bring an end to almost two decades of dictatorial rule.
Larraín’s use of lo-fi aesthetic, merging his cinematography with the actual archival footage, deepens audiences to a time when TV became the place where people could finally speak freely in Chile, and for once speak against the oppressive regime that tore apart so many lives throughout the country.
4 Tony Manero
ProdigitalFabula
One of the first things fascist regimes target are autochthonous cultural standpoints and institutions, the older Indigenous elements which stand in contrast to new regimes of control. The closing of spaces where there is freedom of speech and constitutions of knowledge, such as universities or citizen-driven initiatives, helps authoritarian governments; it creates beings devoid of identity and history, thus being moldable to manipulation and dogmatism.
Alfredo Castro’s character in Tony Manero is a human product of this repression of culture. Totally alienated from his own self, he is suffering obsessive delusions and thinks he is the protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. A character study that also meditates on the impact of the excessive mediatization of American culture on Latin America, Larraín’s second effort brought him to international attention and is still one of the most chilling accounts of what Pinochet’s regime did to Chilean society, and how the powerful cultures can trample over powerless ones.
3 Spencer
Topic StudiosNeon
This imaginative “fable,” as Larraín has described it himself, adds to his talents a stellar group of minds that bring to life one of his most iconic films. There’s Steven Knight’s fantastic writing, Johnny Greenwood’s chilling score, Claire Mathon’s (Portrait Of A Lady On Fire) gorgeous cinematography, but most of all, the heart of this film is the titanic performance from Kristen Stewart.
Spencerfinds her taking on the role of Princess Diana, which she embodies in a way no other actress has been able to. The film is set over the most crucial weekend of her life, in which she considers leaving Charles and the Royal Family. Exploring similar ground to the one in Jackie, in this occasion, Larraín takes it all a step further, adding layers of psychological distress and existential dread, even from its title (Diana’s last name).
2 The Club
Music Box Films
A far darker and more intimate film, The Club finds Larraín at his grimmest. Four former priests live together in a secluded house by the sea. They have all been sent here to purge for their sins (child abuse, baby snatching for adoptions), and their routine is part of that punishment. Their daily schedule consists of monotony and repetition, all in an effort to avoid temptation and properly atone their wrong doings.
Brutal and torturous, The Clubexplores grief, decadence, and repression through a claustrophobic lens, which at times works as a dark comedy. This film holds a special place in the auteur’s filmography as it explores in a more direct way underlying themes present in his previous more politically explicit films.
1 Neruda
20th Century Fox
Fantasy, fiction, reality, and magic find themselves at the crossroads of the artist’s place in the world in one of the most remarkable and underrated films of the 21st century. Neruda is not only Pablo Larraín at his best, it’s also one of the greatest deconstructions of what a biopic is. Echoing the artistic meditations of Parajanov and Tarkovsky on their respective films about the lives of artists, Neruda takes the titular poet’s work as its meta-narrative foundation, covers it in layers of film noir and political intrigue, and blends them all in a mesmerizing plot.
There comes a point where the audience can no longer be sure what it is they are really seeing. Is Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) really being chased by Óscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal)? Why is this police officer so obsessed with him? The constant repetition through Peluchonneau’s voiceover ruminations of Neruda’s work — is this setting the story somewhere closer in spirit to the poet’s magical lyricism? What is real here? Is Neruda’s vanity capable of making up this story? Is he, as a great artist, capable of making it all “real?"
These questions are somehow answered by the end through an act of classical Latin-American magical realism. Larraín’s love letter to art and its makers is an ode to its importance in everyday lives, and the transformative power of words. By the end of Naruda, the viewer believes that art can be a transcendental act of creation.
