urgency while an undercurrent of fear and angst grows. Set three years during
a period of political repression and mass torture under the oppressive
Pinochet regime, Martelli’s narrative follows the life of an upper-class woman
in her secretive resistance during troubling times.
Carmen, a middle-aged bourgeois housewife, dressed in royal blue, carries a
strong presence while she selects the perfect combination of pink for her
family’s renovated beach house. She flips through a picturesque travel guide of
European architecture and design until reality points Carmen’s attention
towards the outdoor noise of authorities taking an unnamed man, while the
same shade of pink hauntingly falls slowly onto Carmen’s shoe. These shades
and Mariá Portugal’s acutely shrill score follow us for the rest of the film,
pointing towards an internal conflict between Carmen and unnerving
surroundings of surveillance and unrest.
Confronted by a trustworthy family friend who happens to be a local cleric,
Father Sánchez (Hugo Medina) requests Carmen to help a young priest named
Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda) whose injurious state remains restrained. Even as
Carmen secretly tends to his injuries, she asks Elías whether he is a common
“criminal,” but after gaining each other’s trust, Carmen considers her valuable
position to aid his cause.
For Carmen, her political and her familial loyalties clash in eerily, imprecise
moments. The excellent work of the actress Aline Küppenheim expresses from
within the tension of the moments in which she feels a certain paranoia around surveillance by the secret police, or her progressive distancing from her own
class bubble that justifies violence from the supposed ignorance of a country
that needs firm hand.
At times, the horrors of the Pinochet regime come to proximity with Carmen’s
direct view. She is unable to avoid the terrors and her own fear in keeping her
grandchildren safe from witnessing the bleakest points of her homeland’s
socio-political turmoil. The film, however, solely focuses on quiet instances of
Carmen’s internalized terror that show with every passing moment, and
especially for those privileged to be able to turn away from the oppressive
regime, their false sense of normalcy is to be critiqued. Martelli chooses not to
reiterate her nation’s fallen legacy in the image of straightforward violence but
carves a subtle, captivating character-study that dives into the tormented and
suppressed life of Carmen, who was chosen to do the right thing.
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This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2023.