'1976': a powerful intimate 'thriller' with Pinochet's terror in the background

2023-01-13T11:02:36.950Z

The debut feature by Chilean actress Manuela Martelli focuses on the silent rebellion of a bourgeois woman who decides to help a clandestine left-wing militant

Emily,

another of the week's premieres,

1976

is also the debut of an actress, in this case, the Chilean Manuela Martelli.

Inspired by her own grandmother,

1976

is a promising debut —the film was selected for the Cannes Directors' Fortnight and is a candidate for a Goya for Best Ibero-American Film— about a woman who doesn't quite fit in with her environment.

Thus, from the intimate and domestic, Martelli builds a

thriller

that exposes the horrors of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

THE TITLE,

1976

, is as frugal and at the same time eloquent as its main character, a silent bourgeois housewife in the skin of a superb Aline Küppenheim who, three years after Allende's death and the same year that another military coup broke out, that of Argentina begins to incubate an agonizing feeling of rebellion.

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Martelli focuses on his main character to parade through the sordid society that endorsed Pinochet's neoliberal dictatorship and also through the margins of clandestine resistance.

Through a wealthy family from Santiago who is fixing up their second home near the sea, this nucleus and its satellites (friends, the housekeeper, the work crew...) function as metaphors for a regime that imposed its model with blood.

The film takes the viewer to the prosperous hall of the coup winners, a sinister comfort in which Martelli places his quiet and uncomfortable heroine: an elegant and mature woman, enormously attractive and reserved, who against all odds decides to venture out and help a young militant persecuted by the police.

Through minute details of everyday life, with few dialogues and an oppressive atmosphere,

1976

portrays a patriarchal and paternalistic country that treats its women like fools and crazy.

That is, in the eyes of her people, this bourgeois woman of whom we know very little, only that she suffered a severe crisis in the past, and who now spends her time and good taste choosing the color of the walls, collaborating with the Red Cross and taking care of her grandchildren.

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Subtle and elegant like its protagonist,

1976

contains moments as powerful and violent as the boat sequence, which leads to vomiting a woman accustomed to silence, perhaps her only refuge.

A woman of pearls and mass who, through her care for an unknown young man, becomes aware of the regime of terror in which she lives.