Review: A Dictator As Dracula? Netflixs Horrorcomedy ‘El Conde Doesnt Draw Blood

Pablo Loren's "El Conde" escapes like the first vampire. Wearing an army commander's hat and flaming dark cloak, appropriate symbols of military might and supernatural power, he lifts lightly off the ground, soaring over the mountains and past the glittering skyscrapers of Santiago, Chile, with quiet grace and a deliberate deadly touch. Surface: He has an excellent evil knife and a thirst for human blood, which he quenches by mashing his victim's still-beating heart into a super-bloody juice. To make matters worse, he appears to be using the victim's blender instead of bringing his own; After all, there is a lot of space under the membrane.

Darkly funny, terrifying, liberating, and lovingly shot in black-and-white (by veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman), El Conde tells the dramatic, hemoglobin-rich story of brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, who led the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. for him. government and brought Chile down through 17 years of terror and trauma. A child of the Pinochet era, Lorraine knows the historic district well. Best known in the United States for the biopic Jackie and Spencer, he rose to fame years ago with a trilogy of Chilean independent films set during the dictatorship, though none of them were worthy of the dark character exploration of Tony Manero (2008). Includes. "Aftermath" (2010), an exciting drama about democracy, and now "No" (2012), the immediate subject of which is Pinochet himself.

So Lauren's decision to finally focus on the man himself, albeit in the form of a 250-year-old leech, feels like a return and a departure, a climax and a kind of residency. He's dabbled in the language of cinematic horror before (notably in "Spenser," with its tense, extreme gothic vibe), but never in such a playful way as to literally reinterpret one of history's greatest monsters. The experiment is not completely successful. Lahren and co-writer Guillermo Calderon work mostly in a tongue-in-cheek, horror-theoretical style that captures the real tension in scary quotes. However, they find a clever metaphor for the survival of evil, suggesting that tyranny always finds a way to live, even if in this case it repeatedly fakes its own death.

The story begins in 18th century Paris, where a young orphan named Claude Pinochet (Clemente Rodríguez) discovers that he is a vampire, and worse, a supporter of the monarchy. The young man was appropriately afraid of the French Revolution, though he wasn't too afraid to lick Marie Antoinette's guillotine blood and quickly faked his own untimely death. A few decades later, he arrived in Chile with a false identity and a slit throat, where he began to practice his counter-revolutionary beliefs. An unreliable narrator (the excellent Stella Johnne), whose character I wouldn't dream of revealing, makes us laugh and cringe at this harrowing counter-narrative, even if you'd guess it just by her thick expressions and vocal intensity.

From this point on, the film largely avoids the Pinochet regime itself, a decision that seems like a missed opportunity given Lorraine's previous ability to dramatize the mechanisms of power. But El Conde is more concerned with the loss of power and the strange purgatory existence that awaits the immortal years after his presumed death at age 91. Much of the film takes place in a remote bunker where Pinochet (now played by Jaime Waddell) lives in debilitating isolation from the outside world. His isolation is far from over, as he is cared for by his concubine Lucia (Gloria Münchmeier) and a less-than-loyal Russian servant, Fyodor (Lorraine, played by Alfredo Castro), both of whom may be older than him. More unprincipled than him.

Soon, Pinochet's five grown children, none of whom are vampires, most of whom are soulless, are determined to take over the remaining family fortune. They are aided somewhat by an accountant named Carmen (Paula Lexinger), who scrutinizes Pinochet's case and uncovers a horrific history of financial crimes, corruption, and mob violence. But the light it sheds on Pinochet and his guilty and self-righteous descendants is not merely investigative. Carmen, the film's most moving and versatile character, is also a woman of God, dressed like a blissful nun and dressed like Dreyer's Joan of Arc, who wants to cast the devil out of her.

However, Satan is not easily defeated, and Carmen's immoral ecclesiastical zeal easily corrupts him. The ineffectiveness of organized religion is not a new theme in this director's work. In some ways, Laren's film most similar to El Conde is The Club, his dark portrait of disgraced and disgraced priests living in church-dictated exile. What animates Pinochet's fallen world and this film is not the possibility of goodness or redemption, but quite the opposite. Evil here is not only destructive. It can also be restorative and even effective. It's worth noting that "Vampires in Flight" is the most exciting entry in the series, a carefree vision of freedom pushed to new heights of ecstasy by bursts of Vivaldi and Andrew Norman on a heavy, classical soundtrack.

Such flights are rare, and the rules of the vampire subspecies are only half-observed. The wooden bars are seriously swinging, but garlic, sunlight and religious talk seem to have little effect. Pinochet's supernatural lust for blood is no longer what it once was, and immortality itself has lost its appeal. "Why would I want to live in a country where people hate me?" he asks. At these moments, Waddell's carefully restrained and understated performance verges on a hopeful sympathy for the devil, especially since the devil is in this case glorifyingly vindicated by the many scoundrels and petty scoundrels around him.

Pinochet's waning appetite for existence, metaphorically speaking, may be why "El Conde" doesn't stick to his character, and why his grasp of the genre seems weaker as it progresses. Instead of uniting and expanding the film's three main themes—horror, fun, and history—Lahren seems content to play them off against each other, a decision that inevitably robs him of authority and political purpose. Turning a human villain into a demonic villain, which is supposed to be the ultimate moral indictment, is practically a kind of cinematic justification. A brilliant piece of conceptual horror art, El Conde is often mesmerizing; As an appropriate subversion of the theme, it cannot help but seem oddly sentimental.

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