El Conde Nails A Dictator's Monstrous Nature

Vampire Diaries

History gets a pop-ironic revamp in Pablo Larraín’s El Conde, a baroque comedy about carnivorous amorality and undying evil. Prahlad Srihari reviews.

THE shadowy figure of a man, sporting the peaked cap of a military general, sails above an urban nightscape. His dark cloak billows behind like outstretched wings, spreading a thick air of menace. There is no doubt as to his predatorial designs, as he towers over tall buildings, government offices, and lonely streets in search of prey. Once he finds his targets, he rips their beating hearts out with a knife and blends them into a bloody smoothie. No, he isn’t a gym bro from California disguising an eating disorder as a healthy diet obsession. He is Augusto Pinochet, the dictator from Chile reimagined as a 250-year-old vampire.

History gets a pop-ironic revamp in Pablo Larraín’s El Conde, a baroque comedy about carnivorous amorality and undying evil. The Chilean writer-director trains his satirical lens on a man who continues to haunt a nation’s collective memory. In this counter-history exercise, Pinochet never died but merely faked his death. He has holed himself up in an isolated gothic estate somewhere in the countryside. By his side are long-suffering wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) and long-serving right-hand man Fyodor (Alfredo Castro). A shroud of fog hangs over a hideaway that is at once haunted and haunting.

Juan Pablo Ávalo and Marisol García’s strings, co-starring alongside the classical compositions of Vivaldi, Purcell and Shostakovich, engulf the atmosphere with an unearthly doom and a corruptive thrall. Pinochet drained a democratic republic of its lives, its riches, its vitality and its colour. Yet, he doesn’t feel sorry for the pain and terror he inflicted on the Chilean people for decades. He feels sorry only for himself, brooding over if he should continue or end his eternal haunt.

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Reuniting with Larraín (for the first time since the lockdown-themed short film “Last Call”), Jaime Vadell plays Pinoche — like he really was Nosferatu — with a parasitic relish. There is also an almost pantomime physicality to the performance, and it marks the locus from which evils ripple outward. The shadow of the Chilean general has loomed over many of Larraín’s films. Socioeconomic decline went hand-in-hand with moral decay in Tony Manero (2008), where a middle-aged man catches “Saturday Night Fever” while those around him suffer under Pinochet’s reign of terror. No (2012) dramatised the events surrounding the 1988 referendum which ousted the General. El Conde puts the spotlight on a man who won’t stop terrorising Chile from the shadows.

Where Jackie and Spencer imagined the private lives of public personas in search of an inner truth via fiction, El Conde transmutes the author of 20th-century Chile’s most painful memories into a bloodsucking caricature to address the ghosts of a country who can’t seem to rest. Thereby, Larraín gives new meaning to Marx’s statement about how “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The farce of it all and the otherworldly textures of its grainy black-and-white images act as a buffer to ensure viewers don’t end up sympathising in any way with a despot.

Vampires are the Swiss Army knife of movie monsters: a metaphor for corruption, a symbol conflating sex and death, a Byronic anti-hero, a misfit living on the edges of society. Larraín, however, ditches the redemptive figure entirely for a repulsive one. There is nothing sexy about Vadell’s Pinochet. Born in France a couple of decades before the Revolution of 1789, he was so amorally diabolical he licked the blood clean off the guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette. The quest to satiate his ravenous thirst ultimately brought him to Chile, where he rose through the ranks to become the worm in the country’s apple. We are given this whole backstory via voiceover by a British icon (Stella Gonet), whose identity reveal is a farcical yet fitting creative choice. Once you hear that haughty tone, that confrontational cadence, that utter contempt for the working classes in her voice, the reveal shouldn’t come as a surprise.

If Pinochet was a parasite, his children are no less. All five of them (Antonia Zegers, Diego Munoz, Catalina Guerra, Amparo Noguera, Marcial Tagle) arrive at the estate in impatient anticipation of their father’s death so they can stake their claim to the fortunes he stole through his tyrannical regime. To figure out where their “inheritance” is hidden, they hire the accountant Carmen (Paula Luchsinger). As it turns out, Carmen is a nun in disguise, tasked by the Church to sow confusion and exorcise the demon believed to be plaguing Pinochet’s soul. The question is: does he even have a soul?

For a full accounting of their complicity, Carmen interviews each member of the family one by one. The picture painted of Pinochet is of a noble martyr exploited by greedy businessmen and antagonised by an ungrateful country. Each readily plays the victim card to convince Carmen that they should not be held responsible for the embezzling, torture, kidnappings and genocide that may or may not have taken place during the reign. Pinochet himself is quick to insist he is no thief. Instead, he claims to have simply used his power to enrich himself. Being a vampire and a malignant narcissist, he is of course not capable of self-reflection.

If the psychodrama in Spencer danced teasingly on the edge of Gothic horrors, the Gothic horrors in El Conde dance teasingly on the edge of an absurdist comedy. Larraín employs the physical and emotional architecture of the estate to sniff out the everyday venality contained within. Making a mockery of a tyrant is a grave business, and he treats it as such, without ever letting the gags crumble to ash like a vampire in sunlight.

Pinochet died before he could be made to answer for his crimes against humanity. Without being served the last meal all vampires like him must partake: a stake. El Conde is by no means a Tarantinto-esque tale of long-delayed comeuppance, but a reminder of how evil can fester for eternity in the cracks of privileged apathy and comfortable oblivion. If we bury the monsters of the past along with the cautionary lessons they embodied, history will inevitably repeat itself. Whether in Chile, Russia, the US or India, despotic vampires may be in our midst, but we cannot become so blissful in our ignorance and so cosy in our indifference to take no notice.

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