OVP: No (2012)

Film: No (2012)
Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Luis Gnecco, Nestor Cantillana, Antonia Zegers
Director: Pablo Larrain
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Chile)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Do you ever find yourself watching a foreign film, particularly a more recent one from a country whose cinema you aren't super familiar with, and afterwards spend several hours in a Wikipedia spiral?  That's what happened with me for No, the first film from Chile to win an Academy Award nomination.  I knew admittedly little about Augusto Pinochet and this election, so, as one should when one doesn't know something, I researched afterwards and while I found that the film was obviously a bit creative in its license, it still stuck rather heartily to some of the concepts behind the campaign and the stunning electoral overthrow of the general.

For those unfamiliar, the movie is about the campaign during the plebiscite against Pinochet in 1988.  Buckling under international pressure, Pinochet declared an election where the people of Chile would get to decide whether he would stay on for another eight-year term as their president.  What at first starts as a bit of a joke (no one believes that Pinochet can actually lose), becomes a real lesson in the will of multiple people, and the film takes a hard look both at the destructive nature of Pinochet's regime and the way that modern political campaigns are run, more for entertainment than for substance.

The film does a few things that seem to have become rather conventional in the past few years.  For example, in a fashion similar to The Queen, no actor actually portrays Pinochet.  Instead the film uses footage of him from real life, giving the film a more documentary-feel and giving us, the audience, more of a connection with the actors; while the creators may be loosely based on real-life people, there were real-life people who took these risks, and by having the actual historical figure as part of the background of the film, Larrain gives a further glance into the historical nature of the piece.

The film does stray in other ways, most notably in its use of U-matic 3:4, rather than being shot with traditional film or digitally.  This gives the movie an authenticity that I greatly admired, and brought us closer to the commercials that were being made by the "No" campaign.  It's a bit jarring to look at from some angles (there were times I was certain the movie was supposed to be in 3-D, and I just hadn't been given my glasses), but overall it had a nice effect.  I am surprised, though, that the Academy, which appreciates its foreign films a little glossier than this, awarded such a film with a nomination.

I don't know if Mad Men is a huge show in Chile, but it's worth noting that the film borrows heavily from Don Draper and his SCDP cohorts, with Bernal's Rene a largely ambivalent man, who at first doesn't seem to really care about the campaign, but just about selling the product and appealing to mass audiences.  It's an interesting concept, and part of me wishes artistically that they would have stuck to it, rather than having him grow more politically involved with the world around him.  The film's central theme, where we see the combination of politics, entertainment, and lowest-denominator marketing is extraordinarily relevant today, particularly in the United States, which I'm guessing may be why the film received the Oscar nomination in the first place.  Rene is constantly trying to tell the others in the campaign to keep things light, keep things funny, rather than having any sort of substantive debate about the product.  Again, this is a far more interesting tale than the dictatorship angle (which has been done, and better, before), and the film, though probably more relatable and speaking more to its likely intent of showing what some men can do in the face of insurmountable odds, sacrifices the most unique idea behind the movie as a result of straying from its best argument: that politics and advertising have become one and the same if the media allows it to be only about the petty.  Compare the commercials here with the series of sound bytes and misuses of people's words that our last presidential election boiled down to (from "binders full of women" to "you didn't build that") and you can see the eery writing on the wall.

But the film doesn't quite hit that nail on the head, instead getting distracted, and while Garcia Bernal's strong work assists, we never hit a level of masterpiece you come to expect from this category.  At least, those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you think this film should have been the upset against Amour?  Did you want to see more of the travesties the Chilean people had to overcome or more of the politics as a commercial aspect?  And, as this is Chile's first nomination, what country do you think will score its first Oscar nomination next?