In a year when there was only one foreign film on everyone’s lips—Michael Haneke’s austere old-age drama, Amour—it’s not surprising that No, a sly political satire with a deliberately scruffy visual aesthetic, neither won the prize nor got a lot of Oscar-season attention. (Did we even get an audience-reaction shot of Gael García Bernal in a tux? And if so, can someone please send me a GIF?) But I really hope No’s nomination helps get people into theaters to see it, because it may be the best movie I’ve seen this year—although given the quality of most January and February releases, that feels like wan praise. Put it this way: There will have to be a hell of a lot of good movies released in 2013 for No not to make my list of the year’s 10 best.
What I love about No is how seriously it takes the humor of its premise. Larraín (who also directed Tony Manero, a bizarre but unforgettable character study of a John Travolta-obsessed loner in Pinochet-era Santiago) is interested in the parallels between commercial advertising and political propaganda. But Larraín’s aim isn’t limited to pointing out those parallels and then encouraging us to laugh hollowly at the crassness of modern consumer society. Instead, the film explores the productive tensions between two competing sets of assumptions about mass media: The rebels’ passionate belief that simply telling the grim truth about the Pinochet regime will be enough to mobilize public sentiment against it, and the ad exec’s pragmatic conviction that such truths tend to go down better with an extra-large spoonful of sugar.
The movie opens in 1988, when Pinochet—who had been installed in a coup with the help of the CIA 15 years earlier—decided to shore up his international legitimacy by holding a plebiscite election to decide whether he should continue as president. Though there was widespread suspicion the election would be rigged, it nonetheless served as an opportunity for the Chilean resistance to marshal public opinion: The Pinochet regime agreed to give the opposition 15 minutes of time per night on state-run television to make its case for the dictator to step down.
No has been a highly controversial film in its country of origin, for reasons that recall the debate about Argo and its representation of the Iran hostage crisis. Many who were involved on the ground with the Chilean resistance in 1988 feel that the movie warped history by exaggerating the importance of this particular ad campaign, and advertising in general, in the eventual success of the movement. And Larraín himself—who, though he was still a child when the regime ended, is the son of a well-known right-wing politician and businessman—has been criticized for trivializing real-life political struggle by turning it into comedy. As a non-Chilean, I can only say that this portrait of a slick salesman who turns crisis into opportunity strikes me as anything but opportunistic and slick. It’s the rare political satire that can sound the depths of irony as No does and still end on a note of ambivalent hope. (slate.com)