Post Mortem

Set in the midst of the US-backed coup against the Allende government of Chile in 1973, this is the story of one simple man's obsession with a dancer who lives over the road, but how everyone around him is consumed instead by the madness of Pinochet's rise to power.

The film is Chilean, and given that I'm currently in the middle of my 'advanced Spanish' course I attempted to watch it without the subtitles. This failed after about 1 minute, such was the speed of the dialogue. I guess it really is a shit load easier to understand a sympathetic speaker who's using simple words. The subtitles went on and I was introduced to the film's main character, Mario. This is a man who works in a mortuary by typing up post mortem reports and lives a rather dull life. We can tell his life is dull because the camera focuses on the numbing minutiae of his existence, things like brushing his teeth or frying some eggs - more of this later.

He spends his time pursuing an ageing dancer who is his neighbour. Then, in the middle of not a lot going on, Mario wakes up one morning to discover scenes of destruction outside his house. His neighbour's place has been ransacked and when he turns up to work there are men with guns bringing in piles of corpses for him to deal with. You see, the US-backed coup of 1973 has just taken place and the Chilean military are now running things. The film tells the story of that coup from a very singular view point, that being Mario's. Mario who lives his life day to day, eats bland food and types reports for a living. Mario and his colleagues then have to perform an autopsy on a man who appears to have shot himself in the head - this man is Salvador Allende.

This is one of these cases where the film really succeeds in painting a picture of utter boredom; so well in fact that the film has shot itself in the foot and become tedious in the extreme. The point might be to build a tension around the inevitability of historical events impinging on Mario's life, and to contrast that defining moment in Chile's history against the mundane and routine - but the film is so slow and boring that it renders all that a moot point. It ends on a silent 5 minute sequence that had me reaching for the fast forward button. Please avoid this film.  If you want to learn about the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power I'm sure there are plenty of other much more interesting source materials out there that'll bring the chilling events of September 1973 to life.