Netflix marketing for its new (2023)horror feature, El Conde (The Count) implies that the movie is a stylish and kinky vampire comedy. This is misleading. El Conde is a plunge into human and metaphysical depravity, a relentless study in evil that is somewhat like a grotesque hybrid of Ari Aster's Hereditary and Succession. I enjoyed the picture and recommend it cautiously, but must admit that I didn't understand many of the film's references to Chile's lamentable history during the past half-century. To fully enjoy the movie, you will need a primer on Allende, the Pinochet regime as well as its aftermath, and, even, a little background on the Falklands War. (As an example, a scene in which someone spits on the plexi-glass shielding Pinochet's corpse when it lies in state refers to a celebrated event that Chileans would recall but which will mean little or nothing to North American viewers of the film.) The movie is funny in an abstract and highly conceptual manner, but you aren't going to be laughing at loud at any of the horrors depicted. Pablo Larrain, the director, is an important figure in contemporary film and he specializes in picture's with a symbolic structure that allegorize political subjects -- the best predicter of whether you will like this picture will be your response to Larrain's films about women entrapped by intricate webs of protocol and obligation, that is, Spencer about Lady Di or Jackie (on the subject of Jackie Kennedy's response to her husband's assassination). Both of those films are austere, stylized, fantastically glamorous in the sort of heroin-chic style of Vogue, and, ultimately, trembling on the edge of becoming full-blown horror films. El Conde that imagines General Augusto Pinochet as an immortal reactionary vampire, of course, crosses the threshold into the horror genre.
From the very outset, Larrain's film is remote, cold, and alienating. An Englishwoman with a plummy accent narrates the picture -- she sounds a bit like an old-time BBC "presenter", over-annunciating and straining for picturesque verbal effects. It's unclear why a British politician or BBC personality is narrating the film but, for the first fifteen minutes, her voice predominates, setting up the grotesque situation that the movie will explore. Pinochet, late the dictator of Chile, has faked his own death (he can't die except by violence -- a stake to the heart), and, so, he is able to become comatose, go into a deep sleep, and, later, revive near Puntas Arenas on the southern tip of Chili in a frigid landscape of barren fjord-like lakes and blasted heath. (He seems to reside in a compound of buildings that were once a station for raising and shearing sheep -- it's a grim-looking collection of rotting structures equipped with a guillotine silhouetted against the foreboding skies. The place reminds me of the decomposing collective farm in Bela Tar's Satantango) Sometimes, the melancholy dictator flies through the air to Santiago where he engages in some desultory murders. He bites through people's throats so that they can't scream, roots around in their thorax for their hearts which he then grinds of up in a blender with vodka like some sort of perverse "smoothie" -- this is an example of the film's humor, the vampire making heart-flesh smoothies in his blender, but it's not a concept like.y to have you splitting your sides with laughter. The movie is shot in luminous black and white and it looks great: brooding landscapes that always seem crepuscular and dimly,lit Santiago with its abstract flares of light, the elderly protagonists in the movie shown in unflattering and cadaverous close-ups -- the movie gives off a very palpable chill. The vampire Pinochet has been around since before the French Revolution and, unlike the monsters in many horror films, has a sort of gruesome psychology: he has a kind of mother-complex, and is obsessed with the execution of Marie Antoinette which he witnessed at first-hand (he licked the guillotine blade after the headless corpse was carted off); he is proud and mourns the fact that his bust has never been installed in Chile's presidential complex -- he visits the place from time to time to inspect the premises to see if he has been accorded this honor and, when he discovers that his image is not there, he morosely stands amidst the other sculptures to complete the array of the presidential heads. Pinochet is very touchy about being called a thief, although his regime was a kleptocracy on a grand scale, he would much rather be remembered as a sadistic killer than as a thief. Pinochet's wife, Lucia, not yet a vampire, is an aging venal whore; she is having an affair, apparently condoned by the boss, with Fyodor, a White Russian torturer who is the Count's sidekick -- he's an unpleasant fellow who is condemned to eat only animal excrement when he's not brewing up heart-muscle smoothies. Into this hideous melange comes Pinochet's five children, all of them aging crooks. (Some of them have been imprisoned for theft and corruption and they sometimes whine about being persecuted by "Leftist" judges and courts.) Pinochet has forgotten where all of his ill-gotten gains are stashed -- he has a house in Aspen, Colorado, money in off-shore accounts, and Panamanian bank deposits. The siblings who want to cash in on Pinochet's immense wealth have hired a very religious young woman as an accountant. She comes to sheepfold in Puntas Arenas to ferret out the secret records in subterranean caches (where the Count keeps frozen hearts for his sustenance) to marshal the old villain's assets. Pinochet is tired of immortality and desires death and has prepared a Will giving half his fortune to his nasty brood and half to his elderly whore wife. Everyone is plotting to kill off the old dictator and, possibly, Lucia as well. The accountant is actually a vampire-killing nun (a "nun-exorcist" -- who would have thought such things existed?) and she has been trained by the Holy Mother Church to gain the confidence of the vampire and, then, slay him. (It seems that the nuns in her convent encourage her to have sex with the monster in order to gain access to the records necessary to account for his fortune.) The curious thing about the movie is that the depravity is all out in the open. The kids know the nun-accountant is trying to kill their dad which is okay with them. They cooperate closely with her in her bookkeeping enterprise because they stand to profit from the endeavor. Pinochet also grasps that the nun is trying to betray and kill him, but he plots to have sex with her and corrupt the woman. Lucia is playing all sides off one another and, of course, the kids would like to see her out of the way. There are some lengthy very dialogue-heavy scenes that document Pinochet's rapacious kleptomania -- probably, these scenes are meaningful to a well-informed Chilean viewer but they were very hard for me to follow. Ultimately, the nun has sex with Pinochet and becomes a vampire herself. Fyodor, the Russian sadist, bites Lucia and she becomes a vampire also. (Spoilers will now follow.) It turns out that the unholy alliance between the Catholic church and Pinochet has turned sour. The Catholic Church has sent the nun-accountant to learn the whereabouts of Pinochet's wealth so that it can expropriate it. The British narrator is revealed to be a famous UK politician who has to fly from her haunts in London to seize control of the deteriorating circumstances in Puntas Arenas. It turns out that Pinochet's wealth has been converted to rare books (Darwin's diary, a manuscript of Hitler's Mein Kampf and so on). Pinochet and Lucia slaughter Fyodor. The nun engages in a bizarre sex scene and some cos-play with Pinochet. She learns to fly and starts murdering people. The nun acts the part of Marie Antoinette and gets hauled to the guillotine in a little wooden cart by Fyodor She's beheaded after a series of shots in which Larrain poses her like Falconetti in Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc -- the nun is unconventionally attractive with a close-cropped head, a huge nose, and stern, angular features. A phalanx of Catholic nuns reaches the sheep-shearing station too late -- Pinochet's wretched brood has uprooted everything that can be stolen and has departed on a boat, called the "Ark", for town. Pinochet and the Englishwoman who is also a vampire eat the hearts of Fyodor, the nun, and Lucia who has also been killed. This rejuvenates them and Pinochet, at the end of the movie, is a mere lad, about ten years old. With the attractive Englishwoman, who turns out to be his mother, he is delivered to a nice private school. (The last thirty seconds of the film are shot in glowing color.) The Englishwoman, who has been narrating the entire film, provides us with a final voice-over that will give you a clue to her identity: she says "If you want something said, get a man; if you want something done, get a woman to do it."
El Conde's excellent photography is by Edward Lachmann, one of Hollywood's best cameramen. The film's dialogue is extremely ornate and has some elements of the Spanish style of Gongora. Everyone speaks in poetic rhetoric. The characters are all wholly vicious to the point of being demons and goblins. No one expresses the slightest regret over the atrocities committed under Pinochet's rule and, indeed, the characters seem to recall those events with pride and pleasure. The Catholic church turns out to be an institution as foul as Pinochet's death squads; all of the murders and torture are squalid and seem to be entirely incidental to Pinochet's real motive which is always to steal as much as he can. There are obvious symbolic implications to imagining reactionary anti-Communist politicians as parasitical vampires, but Larrain isn't really interested in that aspect of the political allegory. The evil in the movie is not social or political but radically metaphysical -- the world is haunted by corrupt murderous thieves. There's a lot of gory murder scenes in the movie but they are somewhat abstract since the film is shot in reticent black and white. Some sequences are astonishingly poetic and beautiful -- a scene in which the nun first flies wildly over the desolate landscape near Puntas Arenas and, then, gradually learns to control her body is gorgeous and unlike anything I've ever seen. In fact, the special effects that simulate flight in this movie are extraordinarily convincing and lyrical. At the end of her maiden flight, the nun is performing dainty ballet pirouettes and capers in the frigid air. The sound track is also extraordinary and surprising -- there's an aria from Henry Purcell's King Arthur called "Cold" that is fantastically effective in context, and other musical cues by Vivaldi, Faure, and Arvo Part, among others. Early in the picture, we hear Strauss' jaunty Radetzky March to underline the imperial aspirations of the vampires and the film ends on that note. In one scene, the vampire and his whore-wife dance to a merry little tune played by a platoon of soldiers who strut and march like miniature figures in a music box -- are they zombies of some sort? There's a funny scene about crimes committed in broad daylight that is redolent, in a way, of the depredations of the Trump era: the military nationalizes a bankrupt factory and sells it to one of Pinochet's kids for a pittance; three years later, the same bankrupt factory in the same condition is bought back by the military (the placing having never been operated) for three million dollars. Someone remarks this wasn't much profit. But, the awful thing, is that no one even tried to conceal the theft. The final "reveal" as to the identity of our female narrator is a little underwhelming -- it's as if George Bush (the second) were revealed to be the vampire's grandfather. The concept is funny but a cheap shot and ridiculous as well.
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