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Pablo Larrain’s “No,” a film from Chile, is strangely inconsequential and indecisive. In some contexts, indecision and ambiguity is a positive characteristic, a “negative capacity” that preserves countervailing ideas in equilibrium and that doesn’t force the audience toward one dogma or another. But “No” is so peculiarly ambiguous that, I think, that the film’s strangely neutral and non-dramatic tone signals confusion as opposed to nuance. In 1988, under international pressure, Pinochet’s regime sponsored a plebiscite vote -- “Si” was a vote for the dictator, “no” was a vote for change. The campaign was limited to 27 days and, to legitimize the plebiscite (generally thought to be rigged), the opposition was granted a 15 minute daily time-slot to make its case. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, the son of a prominent exiled dissident and an advertising executive. Saavedra specializes in feel-good messaging -- his most recent campaign was for a soft drink and his ads feature attractive dancers and humorous montages of perky young people. Reluctantly, Saavedra, who seems more or less apolitical, agrees to direct the PR campaign for the opposition. He has a jingle composed that sounds a bit like the Beatles “Give Peace a Chance,” recruits Hollywood spokespeople, and stages a dozen or so glossy, cheerful infomercials, marketing the opposition to Pinochet the way that he has promoted Pepsi products. Pinochet’s PR flaks use heavy-handed ads starring burn victims scarred by terrorists and accusing their adversaries of being Communists. Saavedra responds with humor and develops a picturesque logo with a colorful rainbow symbolizing the 17 opposition parties waging their campaign against Pinochet. (The logo baffles the generals who think it signifies homosexuality.)The ad agency where Saavedra works is retained by Pinochet’s campaign and, ultimately, the General’s PR lamely imitates the “No” campaign. There is a scary riot with tear-gas and burning vehicles and the anti-Pinochet ad men are threatened, although no one is injured. ”No” wins and, presumably, Pinochet is deposed although this is not shown -- instead we see Bernal’s character on his skateboard, the quintessential urban hipster going to work and, then, presenting a campaign involving beautiful models and James Bond look-likes atop a Santiago skyscraper to promote a soap-opera. It is very hard to know what to make of this narrative and Bernal’s enigmatic performance -- so hip and cool as to be practically non-existent -- doesn’t clarify anything. The opposition forces accuse Saavedra of trivializing Chile’s horrific history, but when polls show that his ads, colorful, youthful, and entirely free from any content, are effective, everyone hops on the bandwagon. It’s not clear to me what the viewer is supposed to make of this: did Saavedra’s high-gloss MTV style commercials really win the campaign or were Pinochet’s days numbered in any event? Is the victory for democracy and reform tainted by the trite imagery used to promote it? Is politics inherently trivial and corrupt or has Saavedra’s campaign merely degraded the opposition to the level of the corrupt general (whose PR staff ultimately adopts the same approach to the plebiscite.) Larrain complicates the story with a tentative romantic angle-- Saavedra’s leftist wife, estranged from her Madison Avenue husband, despises his anti-Pinochet campaign but, ultimately, has to agree that marketing democracy like Coca-Cola is better than bloody street protests in which workers are beset by water cannons and tear gas. (When the woman is arrested and beaten, Saavedra’s boss taps one of his buddies in the armed forces, a staunch Pinochet supporter, to bail her out of jail.) The curious thing about the film is that it feels completely superfluous -- the subject matter seems apt for documentary treatment and it isn’t clear what is gained by dramatizing the story: why not just show the ads and interview the PR men who designed them? In order to draw a contrast between Saavedra’s swiftly cut and glossy ads and the dramatized narrative, the director uses a handheld camera, wobbles it continuously, and shoots into the sunlight overexposing many images into glaring invisibility. The film is self-consciously ugly, poorly lit, spastic with whip-pans and zooms -- in the early seventies, Pable Guzman’s famous documentary “The Battle of Chile,” shot under fire on streets among freshly killed corpses, was more conventionally shot and handsomely edited then this picture. The low-tech digital style is fundamentally annoying, although its function is obvious : the film’s ugly over-exposed digital images -- they look like poorly made home-movies -- is supposed to stand for documentary truth as opposed to the MTV-style commercials that Saavedra (and ultimately Pinochet’s staff) produce. But documentary truth telling us what? That advertising is effective and works best with little or no substantive content. Ultimately, the film seems to be an advertisement itself, a low-tech informercial extolling the benefits of high-tech, focus-group driven advertising.