The Extraordinary Pinochet Case

The best documentary to hit New York screens this year, The Pinochet Case is also one of the best movies, period. This feature by Patricio Guzman?a delayed postscript to his landmark documentary completed piecemeal between 1975 and 1979, The Battle of Chile?is both an important work about one of the 20th century's most savage dictatorships and a stunningly well-made motion picture?precise, intelligent and haunting. Even those who couldn't normally be bothered to pay money to see a documentary in the theater?much less a documentary about the very worst of human behavior?will be absorbed by the film's honesty, anger and moral clarity. It shows us what every civilization is in danger of becoming; then it shows us just how long it takes to address the damage.

Appropriately, for a film that's all about digging up the past, The Pinochet Case starts with an excavation at a dig site, where Chileans have gone to recover the remains of loved ones kidnapped and exterminated by the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. The Pinochet Case concentrates on the more recent years of his life, when a loosely knit group of survivors and activists in Chile, Spain and England joined forces to prosecute Pinochet for his administration's savage reign. The dictator managed to leave office in 1990 without being prosecuted for the murder, torture and oppression that occurred during his 17 years in office; two successive administrations showed little interest in punishing Pinochet or any of his cronies; they reasoned that since a dark period of the nation's history was finally ending, it was better to simply forgive, forget and move on?that there was no point in tearing open old wounds. Naturally, political opponents who survived months or years in Pinochet's prisons and endured beatings, electric shocks, rape and other atrocities were not so eager to move on; ditto the friends and loved ones of people who were kidnapped by police and then simply disappeared. (Pinochet's government modeled its disappearances on methods pioneered by the Nazis, who believed, correctly, that while executing opponents and taking credit for the killings could inspire opposition, making them vanish would inspire feelings of confusion and helplessness?a much more favorable set of emotions if you're ruling a nation through fear.)

Throughout the 90s, a righteous minority in Chile ignored the protests of Pinochet's supporters and the general indifference of the world's legal system, and struggled to find some way to force the world to acknowledge what had happened. The Pinochet Case is a record of that struggle, and it's one of the few of its type that has a somewhat happy ending. Spain, which has a lot of Chilean immigrants, wanted to try the ex-dictator for crimes against humanity. But Chile would not extradite him. Pinochet's decision to visit London in 1998?supposedly for a routine shopping trip, but really for back surgery?offered a fresh chance at justice. Sharp legal minds in Spain and England put together two seemingly separate bits of English law?statutes requiring extradition of fugitive criminals hiding out in England, and statutes defining torture as a crime against humanity that could be prosecuted in any nation that accepts that definition. Together, these statutes pushed the House of Lords toward an inescapable conclusion: Pinochet was a fugitive war criminal who could be detained in London while judges considered his case, then shipped to Spain to stand trial.

The film's legal and moral issues are complex, and to its credit, The Pinochet Case doesn't try to oversimplify them, nor does it try to appease easily distracted audiences from the issues with razzle-dazzle filmmaking. Guzman's directorial style asks that audiences concentrate on what's onscreen?the faces, the words?and imagine things that happened in these people's lives 10 or 20 years earlier. There isn't much news footage, and the bare-bones narration is there mainly to get you from Point A to Point B, setting up the next piece of testimony by a person who either survived torture by Pinochet thugs or who was somehow involved in his extradition process. The movie's style is saying, "Pay attention. This is important." It's the right approach. The first thing you notice about the film's opening sequence is its quietness. There's no music and very little cutting; the combination of a quiet soundtrack and a series of long takes means you have no choice but to concentrate on the physical actions of the diggers; you fix on their faces and listen to their words, and to the soft, horrible sound of tools scraping the earth and a faint wind blowing through the site.

The entire film is like this?and in a time when documentary filmmaking has adopted many of the go-go techniques of tv news (fast cutting, mood music, tricky camerawork) Guzman's controlled intelligence seems bracingly new. The Pinochet Case doesn't try to cram the entire history of Pinochet's dictatorship into two hours; instead, it picks its battles, fixing on a handful of witnesses (torture victims, activists, legal experts, even a friend of Pinochet who insists that in light of the dictator's record as an anticommunist, the torture and death caused by his administration were "minimal"). And it gives us many silent closeups of images that drive home the idea of the past being captured, recreated and reintroduced. There's a montage of file cabinets containing files on victims that roll open, one after another, in smooth succession. There are yellowed, typewritten government documents tracing the life of individual Chileans up to the point where they simply vanished, and photo albums that collect images of the dead and disappeared.

In one of the film's most harrowing sequences, the camera gets close to a diorama recreating a torture facility where political prisoners were held. The tiny buildings and trees are toylike, strangely innocent; you can almost imagine Pinochet's goons going over a diorama just like that one before approving the construction of the place. Cameraman Jacques Bouquin's handheld photography is superb?especially when he's panning the impassive faces of survivors who've gathered to tell their stories, moving from one haunted pair of eyes to another. These sequences are as close as the film gets to breaking the fourth wall, and they work beautifully, because they literalize the idea of bearing witness to an awful event?and because the survivors are literally looking you in the eye, daring you to look back, and then do something.

Framed

Alias Betty is an odd, unwieldy contraption?a thriller based on Ruth Rendell's Tree of Hands that strives to satisfy both suspense buffs and fans of panoramic ensemble dramas?and it doesn't quite come off. But it's often stunning. The less said about the surprise-strewn plot, the better. Suffice to say that director Claude Miller's filmmaking chops carry the day, and he's helped mightily by his large, capable cast, which includes Sandrine Kimberlain as Brigette Fisher, a tightly wound Parisian mom; Nicole Garcia as Brigette's own abusive mom, who unexpectedly comes to visit; Arthur Setbon as Brigette's son, Joseph, who suffers a horrible accident that throws the film's plot into motion; and Jose (Alexis Chatrian), a child of family friends whom Brigette agrees to sit, and who also suffers an unexpected, cruel twist of fate. There are lots of contrivances here?as many as in Magnolia and Short Cuts, two films Alias Betty often resembles?but it ultimately overcomes easy comparisons, evolving into its own strange, marvelous thing.