1976

Director Manuela Martelli quickly and nicely establishes that we are in Chile during the 1970s with news headlines from black and white tv's pointing to the country in turmoil. We meet a well-dressed Carmen who is planning to redecorate her family's summer house while her husband, a doctor, is away for work. When the local priest asks her to help care for a young man with a gun wound, she accepts without question, lies to get some antibiotics and gets in deeper over her head the longer she helps out. Aline Küppenheim gives a subtle performance for what evolves into a complex character that travels around in a world filled with paranoia. There's a theme with shoes throughout the film whether it's Carmen's expensive high heels splattered with paint or one found with a hole in its soul/sole that contrasts class differences. We know it's during the Pinochet regime and though the danger is rarely if seen at all, there's always a sense of mystery and fear surrounding everything. Carmen doesn't know who to trust or if anyone around her is secretly watching her. You could almost say that the tension is Hitchcockian since we've seen a variety of shoes and don't know exactly when the next one will drop.

IN A NUTSHELL: The studio explains that it's set during the early days of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Chile '76 builds from a quiet character study to a suspense, as it explores one woman's precarious flirtation with political engagement in her country. Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim) leads a sheltered upper-middle-class existence. She heads to her summer house in the off-season to supervise its renovation, while also performing local charitable works through her church. Her husband, children, and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation, bringing reminders of the world beyond. When the family priest asks her to take care of an injured young man he has been sheltering in secret, Carmen is inadvertently drawn into the world of the Chilean political opposition and must face real-world threats she is unprepared to handle, with potentially disastrous consequences for her and her entire family.

THINGS I LIKED: The leading actress, Aline Kuppenheim, is fantastic. I had never seen her in anything before. She does an excellent job navigating the subtle layers that take her into dangerous situations, as she chooses her levels of involvement and considers what consequences her actions might have on her loved ones.

The entire cast did a great job and felt like real people, not actors playing a role. Everything felt very authentic and believable.

The director selected some Interesting camera angles in various scenes to remind us of the different perspectives seen in Chile during that time.

It's always fascinating to spend time in another country. In this film, it's Chile. I love seeing what the houses and food look like. I have a nephew who lived in Chile for a couple of years, and I'd love to go there someday. Of course, the Chile represented in this movie is the 1976 Chile.

We get to spend some time at a lovely beach house. It's always been my dream to live right on the beach like that! When my kids were young, we used to rent a house on the beach for a week. Loved it!

The color palette is muted, which underscores the underground movement occurring in the country at the time.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: It's hard to understand what's going on at first. I hadn't read the movie's synopsis so that I could just walk into this "world" in Chile.

Some of the sound effects were interesting choices but also super annoying. I'm sure they were designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the leading lady was feeling with everything going on around her.

It's difficult to see what's happening in the nighttime scenes when the screen is so dark.

Some viewers will complain that nothing "happens." Not all audiences enjoy watching foreign films with subtitles.

Some viewers won't like the ambivalent ending.

For audiences unfamiliar with Chilean politics, it would have been helpful to see more newspaper headlines or TV announcers explaining the political climate of the day. It would have been interesting to read something on the end screen about what happened in Chile after the events we see in the film unfold.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: Smoking Alcohol A woman takes a lot of pills.

Someone gets seasick and throws up. Bleh.

We see a bloody wound up close.

Some profanity and a woman drops an F-bomb in Spanish.

!

What should have been a tense, claustrophobic look at life in 1976 Chile shortly after the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende administration and the imposition of the hard-line Pinochet regime is, unfortunately, a watered-down, meandering, unfocused tale that never fully attains its goal. Writer-director Manuela Martelli's story of a middle-aged doctor's wife who risks her own safety to care for a wounded insurgent in hiding never really catches traction, filling its narrative with endless, unexplained, underdeveloped plot incidents and a woeful lack of character development, including that of the protagonist, whose motivations are never adequately explained but merely hinted at with such subtlety as to be virtually meaningless. By the time viewers reach the film's end, they're more left with an unsatisfying "Oh" rather than a throat-clutching "a ha!" A true disappointment given the subject matter this production had to work with.

Great story with an equally mysterious plot. Carmen visits her house by the big blue to get off of regular life and picks a red paint for walls then tame it with hints of blue. She freezes at screams and her husband gets upset when resistance is called out by a friend in the presence of Carmen. A great story that shows how sacrifices opens the eyes of a sleepwalking masses. Excellent colour tone in visuals and great cinematography capturing expressions well. Unique use of sound effects signaling the tensions kept restrained breaking free. It's a great look at how life was from the outside of recent revolution how social views changed and should change. Excellent.

Chile, 76 follows the lines of The Official Story, an earlier film that also traces the transformation of an Upper middle class woman who slowly is awaken to the atrocities of the fascist coup. To people who think that is not enough explanation, it would be good to read up on the assassination of Allende aided by the CIA. To folks who don't understand why the leading character changes her political position, if you know the history, its clear. She begins to understand that her privileged lifestyle is built upon the backs of the poor, her husband is involved in the rooting out of communists at the hospital, and for once, she feels that she is doing something useful, treating the young man who was shot for his political position. For a woman who grew up in a patriarchal society in which she could not be a doctor, whose life was restricted to acts of charity, this is a game changer. If you are familiar with Chilean films made of this period, you know that the Pinochet regime was based on not seeing, not seeing your neighbors disappear, simplistic explanations, violence, abuse. Its not meant to be an American thriller, so if you want a though provoking film, this is it.