Gael Garcia Bernal seems to have a thing for playing revolutionaries. I first encountered the Mexican actor in 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries, where his soulfully beautiful (physically and metaphorically) portrayal of Che Guevara forever instilled in me a sympathy and attraction for Communist guerrillas (I have yet to act upon this, sadly). In No, he takes on the role of Rene Saavedra: a somewhat jaded advertising executive who designs the TV campaign fighting oppressive Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, during the 1988 referendum.
On Saturday, I told my friends that I was going to see No. Their response was essentially “huh? Pino-who?” with a Homer Simpson-esque expression. With this in mind, here’s a brief history lesson, for those who aren’t quite up on their 20th Century Latin American politics:
In 1988, General Augusto Pinochet had been the dictator of Chile for 17 years, following a US-backed coup in the early 70’s. His regime caused the torture, death and disappearance of thousands of Chilean citizens and effectively suppressed any dissenting opinion. In 1988, under pressure from the international community to legitimise his rule, the right-wing autocrat allowed a plebiscite – a referendum – to decide whether to allow him to control Chile for another 8 years, or to give democracy a chance and hold an election.
With that out of the way, let’s discuss the film. Most striking is director Pablo Larraín’s decision to film on Sony U-matic magnetic tape, commonly used on1980’s Chilean TV. This creates an old-school, low resolution effect, with colours and light appearing like an over-exposed Polaroid. At first the technique was jarring, being as we are so used to hi-def, highly saturated widescreen, but once the story took hold, it became less distracting, as well as allowed Larraín to smoothly integrate genuine footage from the dictatorship.
With such potentially serious, harrowing subject matter, the film thankfully doesn’t stray into sentimentalism or melodrama. Much like the TV ad campaign that Saavedra creates, it keeps the tone generally light, allowing only snippets of danger and fear to creep in. If anything, this makes these moments all the more powerful – the scene in which the No campaign’s celebratory protest is disrupted by government forces, concluding in Saavedra’s wife being dragged away, blood smeared under her defiant eyes, is particularly heart-wrenching.
It is the simple realism of No that makes it a success. It doesn’t over-reach: rather than attempting to demonstrate every human rights violation of the oppressive regime or show the pain of a entire generation, the film portrays one moment in time, a crossroads between the painful past and the hopeful future. Saavedra is no revolutionary hero like Guevara; his face is not destined to be plastered on the t-shirts of Camden market. Instead, he is a man doing his job and doing it well, because he is no longer able to take any more.
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