Larraín: No (2013)

Pablo Larraín's extraordinary fourth film presents a semi-fictional version of the 1989 Chilean plebiscite, in which the people were asked to vote on whether they wanted Augusto Pinochet to serve another eight-year sentence as military commander, or transfer to democratic leadership. Specifically, it centres on the tension within the 'No' faction between the advertising subcommittee and marketing expert René Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), brought in to run the television campaign. While the subcommittee are anxious to invoke Pinochet's misdeeds, Saavedra insists that an upbeat vision of a democratic future, revolving around a rainbow logo, is more likely to win the plebiscite. At first, the film seems poised for a celebration of the ingenuity of advertising in the vein of Mad Men, but there's a different kind of deftness to Larraín's vision of how a mere consultant, or technocrat, comes to find himself touched and transformed by political consciousness. In part, it's because Saavedra's prescient that this isn't simply a battle between autocracy and democracy, but between the autocracy of the cinematic image and the democracy of the televised image. Where Pinochet's advertisements favour panoramic, monumentalist, cinematic sweeps, Saavedra devotes himself to drawing out the inherent affinities of television, distilling the warmth of every sitcom, music video and telemarketing channel ever aired, and wrapping it all in an ebullient 1980s sheen. It feels right, then, that the entire film is shot on low-quality magnetic tape, not least because the poor resolution adds a refractive rainbow to the edge of every object: the campaign logo is already right there, in the medium itself. And there's a real art to the way Larraín absorbs all the spectra of the rainbow into the pools of light that flood his mise-en-scenes - at times, you can almost see the water molecules in the air, as if something were forever on the verge of pixelating or precipitating out of the tape, or the tape itself were forever on the verge of warping and transfiguring into something even more expansive and collective. Perhaps that's why the ending feels so indeterminate and ambiguous: although Larraín definitely says 'No' to Pinochet, his 'Yes' to democracy feels more provisional, like a stepping stone to something better that hasn’t arrived yet, making for that rare thing: period drama premised on a shared future as much as a shared past.