Butler's Cinema Scene

“EL CONDE”  My rating: B (Netflix)

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

As a rule, political strongmen despise artists, dismissing them as dreamers and dissenters always threatening to infect the body politic with their decadence.

Thing is, given enough time the artists always have the last word.

Exhibit A is “El Conde (The Count),” a Chilean feature that informs us that right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet did not die in 2006, as is widely believed, but lives on as a vampire who sucks the life out of unsuspecting victims just as he sucked up the wealth of his country.

Written and directed by Pablo Larrain (who co-wrote with Guillermo Calderon), this batshit-crazy blend of horror and political satire plays out in an otherworldly, treeless landscape that has been magnificently captured in Edward Lachman’s sumptuous black-and-white photography.

Here’s the setup: The aged Count (Jaime Vadell) is slowly losing his marbles in a sort of sprawling ranch house that has seen better days.  (It must be the only homestead on Earth that features a functioning guillotine.)

His wife Lucia (Gloria Munchmyer), his butler and (during the good old days) chief torturer Fyodor (Alfred Castro) and the Count’s four back-biting adult children have gathered in emergency session. They all fear that the world-weary old dictator will starve himself to death before they can figure out where he squirreled away his ill-gotten fortune.

To help sort it all out, the family has employed a forensic accountant, a young woman named Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger).  What they don’t know is that Carmencita is a nun who has traded in her habit for street clothes. What’s more, she has orders to perform an exorcism on the evil old bastard.

Paula Lunchsinger

(Am I imagining, or are Luchsinger’s sharp features and boyish ‘do lit and photographed in such a way as to evoke memories of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc?)

While the characters deliver their lines in Spanish, the story is narrated by a female with an English accent.  Initially this is puzzling…before it’s all over we’ll meet this woman face-to-face, confirming our worst fears about a once-powerful world leader.  (Yeah, that’s kinda vague. 
But the late-reel reveal is too delicious to give it up here.)

In flashbacks we see how as a young soldier in the French revolution the Count developed a taste for blood (he actually licks the blade that beheads Marie Antoinette) and a hatred of revolutionaries and lefties in general.  (How did he become a vampire?  It will be revealed, but not here.)

Eventually he made his way to the Americas,  became a ruthless military leader and took over Chille after a CIA-planned 1972 overthrow of Salvador Allende’s freely-elected socialist government.  For more than 20 years Pinochet ruled with an iron hand, “disappearing” more than 1200 troublesome citizens and torturing countless others.

Gloria Munchmyer, Jaime Vadell

According to this film’s alternate history, when finally deposed and facing conviction for human rights violations, the Count faked  his own death and retreated to his remote hideout.

Periodically, though, he dons his old caped uniform and glides through the night sky to Santiago to feast on humanity.  These flying scenes are spectacularly dreamlike…even beautiful in a balletic way.

 “The Conde” has a fine old time fiddling with the usual vampire tropes, and its gleeful indictment of reactionary politics and the pilfering that so often accompanies it is absolutely merciless.

There’s a built-in issue with the film…none of the characters — not even the undercover nun — is remotely likable.  Everybody is greedy, scheming, corrupt.  Or willing to be corrupted.

Thankfully the acting, the allegorical elements and the mind-blowing technical expertise (photography, locations, costuming, production design) are so inventive that there’s always something marvelous to wonder at.

The film would probably have benefitted from a tighter edit (lose 15 minutes and you might have a small masterpiece), but as it stands “El Conde” is a nasty miracle.

| Robert W. Butler