Review: El Conde (2023)
The dictator as a vampire; the vampire movie as an allegory of fascism
El Conde (2023)
Directed by Pablo Larraín
This tour-de-force by Chilean director Pablo Larraín might be approached many ways. One is through a Shakespearean frame, since much of the plot has to do with the prospective inheritance from an aging ruler, and the squabbling of his children (King Lear) or the sheer madness of a king who is a great murderer, and of his wife, equally squalid and disgraced (Macbeth).
The other, more obvious route is through the horror genre and its subgenre the vampire movie, which requires an extremely adept filmmaker to save it from sliding into sheer camp. (Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (1979) has been, until now, the only modern version that passes that test.) Its tropes, and the obscure legends that lie behind them, are numerous and well-known. Like a film that dramatizes (or has as its background) the life of Christ, the vampire film risks being swamped by its long list of required scenes and images — the undead antihero who, despite being weary of life after hundreds of years, cannot die; the crucifix-wielding, wooden stake-bearing vampire hunter; the virginal victim; avoidance of sunlight; the ability of the vampire to fly, sometimes turning himself into a bat or other carrion-eater; the ability to turn others into vampires by biting but not killing them; the distant howls of wolves. (Here we could insert a consideration of “The Silence of the Lambs” as, at least in part, a vampire movie.)
A film is a masterpiece when it presents something familiar in an entirely new light. In “Citizen Kane” (1941), Orson Welles took the American rags-to-riches myth and used it to illustrate the moral decay of the rich. In “Sorry to Bother You” (2018), Boots Riley used surrealism to show the culture shock of an African-American man who is invited into the precincts of the white and wealthy. In “Ran” (1982), Akira Kurosawa depicted the disintegration of the aged King Lear’s family as a samurai epic. And in “Trenque Lauquen” (2023), Laura Citarelli turned the whole concept of a mystery story inside out by submerging its would-be detectives’ quest into a journey without goal and without end.
Likewise, “El Conde” — one of several excellent “foreign films” nominated for an Oscar this year — turns the story of Chile’s murderous dictator into a vampire story, and turns the vampire movie into an allegory of fascism. Another characteristic of a masterpiece is that afterward the viewer feels that the work was inevitable. Of course murderous, fascist dictators can be viewed as sadistic vampires, consuming their victims and stealing their riches. Of course the dictator is an incarnation of evil while at the same time justifying his deeds, no matter how violent and genocidal, as necessary and even holy.
(The endorsement of a fascist governemnt by the institutional church is also a common phenomenon in dictatorships. As in Chile, sometimes the church makes nice with the devil in an attempt to survive; other times, as in Hitler’s Germany or Putin’s Russia, the dictator outlaws any religious resistance and governs with the approval of the priests who are left, the most hypocritical. In the U.S. today, the spectacles of white evangelicals supporting Trump, and of Christian Dominionists attempting to get out in front of the fascism they hope is coming, are especially disgusting.)
In “El Conde,” we find retired Gen. Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) old and feeble. Seemingly close to death, he lives with his wife Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer) and their sole servant Fyodor (Alfredo Castro) in a deserted, crumbling military camp in the Atacama Desert. At first this seems like a suitable ending, of exile and isolation and disgrace, for the former dictator; and in fact, he tells his wife that he wants to die. The monotony of their lives is broken when the general’s greedy children show up at the camp to demand their inheritance — the millions that the dictator amassed during his reign — and summon an accountant to do an audit. But the accountant is a nun and experienced exorcist. She is determined to save the general’s soul — or, if she finds he has none, to kill him once and for all.
Thus the setting and the premise. Much of the movie’s first half alternates between scenes of the aged dictator in his lair, and of his origins and methods (he doesn’t directly devour his victims, but slices their hearts out, puts them in a blender, and drinks the resulting blood-muscle smoothie) with scenes of the hunt for evidence of his riches and the efforts by the general, his wife and his butler to stymie it. This setup suggests a comical farce, but while the film is at heart a satire — of vampire movies, but also of the louche trappings and hollow dignity of dictators — and does contain many moments of humor, any laughter dies off in the overbearing stink of decay and death. Thousands of Chileans were killed in such camps, and the foreboding atmosphere, gorgeously shot in black-and-white by Cinematographer Edward Lachman, is full of unseen ghosts.
The performances by the three principal actors, Vadell, Münchmeyer, and Castro, are extraordinary, balancing the frumpiness of old people with hints of the terror they once oversaw and are still capable of. The performance of Paula Luchsinger as the accountant-nun-exorcist, is on another level. At times she is wiggy, asking off-kilter questions about the hidden wealth, with weird smiles and facial expressions that suggest she might be a bit mad herself. Later, when she faces the vampire and is altered by him, she becomes more beatific than she ever was as a nun. She has made the mistake — one that Clarice Starling was careful to avoid — of allowing her enemy to identify her as an object of desire.
The film does something to put you off-guard from the outset: it is narrated in English by an older woman with a precise, upper-class British accent. Watching the film on Netflix, at first I thought my audio settings were off, because the dialogue was in Spanish but the narration was in English. It turns out it’s supposed to be this way, and the identity of the narrator, revealed twenty minutes before the film’s end, is such an amazing and powerful surprise that I’ll just urge you to see this masterpiece for yourself. Just be sure to watch it in a dark room with no lights, if possible, to best appreciate the images of the dusty, foggy concentration camp and the dim interiors.