***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain
by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation’s fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country’s last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions–an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country’s wealth tanked as Pinochet’s exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine’s blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen’s head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.
Wealth and power have only ever belonged to the very few, El Conde suggests. Not the most deserving, just those lucky enough to be born into an entrenched bloodline–or, in this case, literally the same small group of ghouls feasting across millennia while everyone else is reduced to a blood puppy. The aristocracy, the clergy–parasites, both, to the body politic. For his part, Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) has grown weary, wishing at last for the sweet release of death and inviting his aged children to visit him in exile on a remote ranch so that he might distribute his ill-gotten loot to them. That is, until he’s visited by a sweet-necked emissary from the Church, Sister Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), and finds a renewed sense of purpose to, if nothing else, recover enough vitality to properly ravage her. Yet even the good Sister isn’t as pure as she seems, something a wry voiceover by a surprise narrator (it’s Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet)) notes as she lays out the nun’s Church-backed plan to fleece the vampire Pinochet’s money and keep it for themselves. The targets of Larrain’s ire, then, are the state, naturally, but also every organized institution that fattens itself off the public shunt–like vampires, n’est-ce pas?, suckling off the people for their own gratification. A familiarity with Pinochet’s crimes will amplify the complexity of Larrain’s wrath, as will an awareness of the wreckage The Iron Lady wrought on the UK, the legacy of which bleeds into the sorry state of the island nation’s current affairs.
Still, El Conde doesn’t require a strong knowledge of recent world affairs to work. It’s a stately horror film with bursts of queasy violence and a familial melodrama with affairs and generational jealousies coming to a head in a The Rules of the Game scenario where, amidst the trappings of decayed opulence, a family of pathetic old monsters gathers to squabble over scraps. El Conde may seem like a drastic departure from Larrain’s deep-dives on Princess Diana (Spencer) and Jackie Kennedy (Jackie), but in its depiction of lost souls wandering palatial spaces in the aftermath of–or the run-up to–unspeakable historical events, the picture reveals itself as both part of a thematic trilogy and a sharp summary of Larrain’s vision of the fall of the human empire. It’s like the third movement of a classical composition that takes an entirely unexpected turn while containing a thread of an orchestral theme that binds it to the first two. When it’s finally revealed where the money Pinochet pillaged has actually gone, it all becomes clear; Larrain’s films are about how the kingdom of Man is built on horror and (barely) sustained by momentum. We died a long time ago, we just don’t have the sense to lie down.
I kept thinking of Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, which features analyses of mythologies around an axis of binary oppositions, the simplest of which the idea that “rawness” represents a natural state, while the act of cooking brings an object into an unnatural (or civilized) state. The fourth section submits the problem of a woman presented with the heart of her lover, first raw, then cooked, and how she treats the one ritualistically, sorrowfully, and the other as a meal. I always found the lesson of this parable to be hopeful: how we mourn the loss of what is natural about us, and how the act of domestication renders what is good and moral about us unrecognizable as anything except fuel. But at least we mourn. Pinochet puts the hearts of his victims in a blender; if possessed for a spell by bloodlust, he freezes the extra ones for later. “Old blood,” Thatcher sneers in her voiceover, is “muddy.” She and Pinochet enjoy the fresh variety, preferably of noble and not South American birth. Everything in this film is barbed and laden with political subtext. Shot in black-and-white by Todd Haynes’s cinematographer Edward Lachman, El Conde is a great horror film, it’s true. It’s also a withering critique of all human achievement as food for ghouls who no longer romanticize the things we lost. Civilization was always a misnomer, always a lie. El Conde is the truth.
