7. Chile — No
2012, directed by Pablo Larraín
How do you sell “No”?
With attractive young people, catchy jingles, and an idealistic, but probably a little tone-deaf message that “happiness is coming” after years of systemic oppression. This breakthrough film for Pablo Larraín, Chile’s most successful director and producer, is essentially about a successful political ad campaign.
In 1988, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet called for a national plebiscite, or vote, on whether to extend his rule. The plan was designed for him to win and for his regime to gain international legitimacy. The case for “No” — 16 prior years of right-wing autocratic rule after a U.S.-backed coup d’état, state terror and persecution of political opposition resulting in an estimated 1000–3000 people executed and tens of thousands tortured or disappeared, and trickle-down economic policies that made the rich richer, exacerbated income inequality, and impoverished millions. That last one sounds familiar.
Gael Garcia Bernal, a tremendous actor, plays the role of a pragmatic, ambitious, and a little quirky creative: an advertising agency’s creative director, in the vein of Don Draper (but Mad Men this is not). Why does the “No” side need an ad man? Well, they need to fill 15 minutes of TV, “equal time” for either side, every evening for a whole month before the vote. Proponents of the equal time rule or publicly funded elections in our country would think this was a model plan, but Pinochet literally had state-owned media. So, basically, the “No” side only had those 15 minutes per night.
Having lived through the 2020 election in the United States, I could not stop comparing and contrasting themes, ideas, and arguments. For example, Bernal’s ad man is down for the leftist cause, but he thinks they can win only with a positive message (think “Yes We Can”) and not one focused solely on why Pinochet was evil. Compare and contrast to 2020, when Biden won narrowly on a mostly anti-Trump platform, and the winning side’s most memorable ads came from the Lincoln Project and were explicitly anti-Trump. Bernal’s character has to navigate his colleagues on the Left calling him a sell-out, with his conservative ad agency boss first pressuring and then bribing him to stop working for the “No,” as well as the secret police intimidating and terrorizing his family. When his boss joins the “Yes” campaign, he tells Pinochet’s officials, “If you want to scare people, scare them with their past.” Again, contrast to 2020. Unlike in the United States (see the Willie Horton ad), the negative campaign doesn’t work out. On the night after the vote, there is some speculation that Pinochet would overturn the results and refused to step down, but this does not happen. Ultimately, the film concludes with the ad man and his boss somewhat reconciled, and the boss touts the ad man’s successful “No” campaign while they pitch a new corporate campaign based around a social message. Endlessly poignant comparisons to our time. Watching this film could be on the syllabus of a class in comparative political science.
Mr. Larraín used a cinéma vérité style and a type of film stock used by Chilean TV news in the 80s. Initially, the image is jarring, it looks a little bit ugly, but this makes the film look like a product of that time, which was a unique cinematic choice. I was a fan of Mr. Larraín’s more recent film Jackie about the assassination of her husband from the perspective of Jacqueline Kennedy. That film is a powerful historical drama propelled by a career best performance by Natalie Portman and a one-of-a-kind film score by Mica Levi. Besides the catchy jingle, I wish No made use of a more moving score.
Notably, No is the first movie on my list that is a historical drama. Timbuktu was only loosely inspired by a historical event, but the plot was fiction and did not feature historical figures. No uses the technique of inventing a fictional character and inserting him into the real historical event as an entry point for the audience. For example: The Last King of Scotland or Argo. It is movie magic, but it works quite well here, even though the fictional character is subsumed by the historic event by the end.
I saw No on DVD from the Arlington Public Library. You can find it on streaming platforms.
This is #7 in my World Tour of Cinema project. Read my introductory post here.
