“No”

The new Chilean picture, No–recently nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar–doesn’t quite fulfill the enormous potential of its subject matter, but it’s still easily one of the strongest, most interesting movies to open here this year. An examination of a pivotal moment in Chilean history–the 1988 referendum, which saw the murderous, American-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet replaced by a democratically elected government–No employs a highly unusual (and rather witty) formal strategy: it builds its narrative around a treasure trove of actual campaign ads from the period. According to the director, 36-year-old Pablo Larrain, these old television advertisements make up about 30 percent of the film’s running time. The narrative surrounding them, meanwhile, is a largely fictionalized look at how the ads were conceived, and how the anti-Pinochet campaign–the “No” side–employed air-headed, Up With People-style imagery to win the referendum and change things for the better.

In order to transition as seamlessly as possible between archival and fictional material, Larrain filmed on authentic ’80s-era U-matic video cameras, which means that, throughout, the movie looks terrible–like a blurry, pinky Betamax dub found in the back of a closet. As a general rule, I don’t consider ugliness a legitimate aesthetic choice, but the approach works here: not only does it keep everything of a piece, it imparts a sense of a more technologically innocent time. Not only was I not grossed out, I found myself unexpectedly moved–nostalgic, I suppose, for my own low-res childhood, when media images were still largely contained to a tube in the living room. (I’d be very curious to know how the post-analog generation perceives it.)

No‘s central figure is the fictional René Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), an apolitical ad man who, when the movie begins, is coming off a hugely successful campaign for Free Cola, a campaign that looks about a decade behind anything on American airwaves at the time. (It features mimes!) When asked to work for the “No” campaign, which has been granted 15 unbroken minutes per day on state television to make its case, René is interested but wary. He has no love of Pinochet–he had to live abroad for several years due to the crackdown on leftists and artists–but he has a hard time believing the referendum can be legit. Like most of the populace, he thinks it’s an empty gesture toward democracy, a charade mounted by Pinochet to placate the international community. Nevertheless, he decides to give it a shot, if only to impress his leftist-activist ex-wife (Antonia Zegers), whom he still loves.

This is where the film really takes hold. Rather than focus solely on the conflict between the “Yes” and “No” campaigns–a more or less easy, good-vs-evil scenario–Larrain focusses on the tensions within the “No” camp. On one side: Saavedra, who wants to sell freedom from Pinochet the same way he sold Free Cola, with images of young folks laughing and bouncing on trampolines and dancing in leg warmers. On the other side: the serious, committed leftists, who are appalled at the mindlessness of Saavedra’s approach and want to focus on Pinochet’s regime of oppression and murder instead. (“I think that this doesn’t sell,” is all Saavedra says when he sees their depressing campaign ideas.) It’s a great set-up because it’s truly hard to know whom to side with. Though we know in advance that Saavedra’s approach is going to get Pinochet ousted, we can’t quite condone the shallowness of it or the implicit cynicism. Even more so than Lincoln, No pits integrity against efficacy, and suggests that too much integrity harms more than it helps.

I think No could’ve been stronger, however, if it gave a fuller sense of why the populace voted as it did. Was it really just because of these tacky, unsophisticated ads? I wasn’t exactly surprised to learn, via a recent New York Times article, that many Chileans feel No distorts events (or at least majorly oversimplifies them) by pretending Pinochet’s ouster began and ended with the ad campaign, that there wasn’t a massive grass-roots effort led by the people themselves. This isn’t just a matter of neglecting to tell the whole story: by focussing exclusively on Saavedra’s campaign, the movie suggests, intentionally or not, that people are sheep, that they can be made to do anything solely via the wizardry of Madison Avenue.

Lord knows there’s probably some truth to that, but I have enough faith in people to doubt it’s entirely true. Take, for example, Coke: do we buy Coke because we actually believe the inane messages in the advertising? That drinking it will make us fun or hip or deliriously happy? No, we buy it because it tastes good or because we’re addicted to the chemicals and corn syrup. The commercials simply remind us that Coke is a thing, that it’s out there, and that lots of other people drink it. In the case of the Chilean referendum, did people actually fall for the chipper, cheesy anti-Pinochet campaign? Or did the campaign simply let people see, by its sheer existence and omnipresence, that the referendum was a thing–a real thing, not a charade–and that lots of other people wanted Pinochet out, thus making it acceptable to vote “No.” (Is this, like, McLuhanism? Possibly, but isms have never been my strong suit.)

In Larrain’s defense, the movie leaves much of what we see open to interpretation, maybe a little too open. While I was happy not to be told what to think, I often found myself wanting to know more about what, say, Saavedra was thinking. For instance, when Saavedra first presents his campaign and meets with harsh words from the team, it’s unclear if he even understands why they’re upset. Later, when Saavedra stares slack-jawed at a parade of people in the street singing his (insanely catchy) campaign jingle, I wasn’t sure if he was moved by his own success or alarmed. (Maybe a bit of both?) Bernal is wonderful in the role–he contains all of these possibilities and more within himself–but screenwriter Pedro Peirano (working from a play by Antonio Skarmeta) doesn’t allow him any introspective moments. Right up to the end, we have no idea whether he’s an advertising true-believer or simply the ultimate pragmatist.

That may be by design, of course; the whole movie is rife with uncertainty, not to mention ambivalence and irony. The biggest irony, if you think about it, is that there really can be no such thing as a “No” campaign. To paraphrase Renata Adler, advertisements–like photographs and television shows and movies–always argue “yes.” Which is to say, they inevitably validate and promote whatever it is they show us, simply by choosing to show it. (This is why, as they often say, there can be no such thing as a true anti-war film.) Saavedra’s anti-Pinochet ads aren’t actually anti-Pinochet at all: they’re just pro-happiness, pro-mindlessness.

In the movie’s final moments, Larrain smartly (if a little disappointingly) underplays the triumph of Pinochet’s ouster, leaving us to wonder if Chile has simply exchanged one form of tyranny for another: the tyranny of capitalist commercial culture. In his breakout film, Tony Manero–about a Chilean sociopath obsessed with John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever–Larrain showed how pop culture, when embraced uncritically, can warp values, can become a toxin in the collective bloodstream. By the end of No, Saavedra has essentially injected all of Chile with the virus of American commercialism.

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