48th NYFF 2010: Pablo Larrain’s Post Mortem

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s third outing is crisp, assured, very cool movie. Post-Mortem walks this unique line between surrealism and just plain non-traditional narrative. The protagonist also walks a very closely intertwined morality and sanity line. We don’t really know what kind of movie we’ve been watching nor who our main character is until the final scene. What’s powerful about that is — we care.

Alfredo Castro gives a haunting performance as Mario, that is well coupled with his equally eerie Raúl Peralta in Larraín’s Tony Manero. What’s toughest about this is we never truly know until the end, and arguably not even then, if he is the only sane one amongst the insane or a real danger to those around him. Mario can be read at all times as either introspective, introverted and intelligent to a fault, or as a brooding, angry sociopath and volatile presence of danger to those around him. Regardless, he is disconnected.

Making matters worse, or for that matter, further blurred and grey, is the historical context of the story. It takes place during the 1973 coup that overthrew and assassinated dictator Salvador Allende. The title refers to Mario’s profession, typing autopsy reports in the morgue. He ends up working on Allende’s autopsy, in a very difficult scene that Larraín tells us is very close to the way it actually happened. Once act two comes along and we realize the moral ambiguity and hypocrisy, or better yet, evil, that surrounds Mario with the soldiers and politicians leading executions and bombings seemingly at random, it gets even harder for us to get a fix on Mario.

We spend the first act following Mario through a dream-like fantasy derived from his obsession with burlesque dancer Nancy (Antonia Zegers). The viewer is convinced that Mario is off and additionally that we’re either viewing his dream/fantasy or Larraín is placing us into a surrealist world where nothing is as it seems, and everything is a little off. Act II places Mario in more of a traditional protagonist’s role though, and he is now our lens into which we view the atrocities of the Chilean coup. All the sudden, he is the one whom Nancy turns to during their collective trauma, and he seems like a pretty normal guy. The narrative also unfolds in a more classical observatory style, and we no longer feel that discomfort. There is a scene that gets repeated (which I won’t reveal as per spoilers) a few times, which throws us for a loop relating to Nancy’s place in the narrative, but otherwise, things are pretty straightforward.

Act III gets more frenetic and once again, places the viewer in a position of doubt with the film’s final stance enabling for an assembly that makes sense. Revealing that ruins the entire experience for you, so please don’t look around for the ending. Larraín achieves a Lynchian tale, playing with time and space, shifting moods, ambivalent protagonists, and unlimited interpretations. Many questions are answered in the end, but the moral ambiguity is cemented in, and we are left required to involve our personal feelings more than what the filmmaker tells us in order to come to any conclusions.