Thursday, March 07, 2013

No - Sunday 10th March 5pm


Our film on Sunday is No, the final film in Pablo Larrain's  Pinochet-era Chilean trilogy. It stars Gael Garcia Bernal, who is a familiar face (Even the Rain, Babel, Amores Perros, Motorcycle Diaries) and certainly enthused the audience at Cannes (don't worry, its the Cannes jury we have a problem with, not the audience) as reported by the Guardian:
Once in a while, a film comes along at Cannes that gets the blood pumping – a work that seems destined to break out of the arthouse ghetto, that feels, above all, like a fresh vision and voice. This year, that moment has come with No, a ­Chilean film tucked away in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar of the festival, its unpromising-sounding subject being Chile's 1988 referendum. Its premiere was greeted with whoops, cheers and seemingly unstoppable applause. 
What Gael's character does is key to understanding present-day Chile, says Larraín. "Pinochet imposed a capitalist society in Chile: our character grabbed the tools of capitalism that Pinochet had provided – advertising – to pull him out." For all the film's humour and joy, there is an ambivalence at the story's heart: a hardnosed cynicism in the admen's tactic of selling the idea of l'alegría, happiness, to the populace, just as if it were a soft drink called Free.