“Why would I want to keep on living in a country where people hate me?” So says Augusto Pinochet, who, after two centuries of life as a vampire, has finally decided to die. The Oscar-nominated film El Conde, directed by Pablo Larraín, bitterly satirizes Chile’s infamous dictator, who staged a coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende, and then ruled the country for 17 years.
In this grisly farce, up for an award for its cinematography on March 10, Larraín manages to inject freshness and humor into a story that has been told and retold for decades. But despite its clever appropriation of the horror genre, El Conde does little more than retell the same old joke: Pinochet, reimagined as an actual bloodsucker, denies any wrongdoing or blood on his hands. In the process, Larraín seems to overlook the perspective of real Chileans of carne y hueso, both on screen and off.
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