From Pinochet to Princess Di: Pablo Larraín won’t stay in his lane

By Simon Willis

It was a sweltering Venice evening and Pablo Larraín was twitchy. The Chilean film director, whose neat dark beard and drooping, deeply shadowed eyes gave him a passing resemblance to King Charles I, was sitting in the bar of the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido, home to the Venice Film Festival. Around the corner, assembled members of the international press were about to watch his new film, “Ema”, for the first time. Jiggling his leg manically, Larraín sipped from a glass of rosé. “I would rather be at home,” he said.

“Ema” was Larraín’s follow-up to “Jackie”, his jagged, disorientating portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life after the assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy, in 1963. Larraín’s English-language film debut was nominated for three Oscars in 2017; soon, some of Hollywood’s most sought-after scripts were being sent his way. When we met in Venice last year, he had just flown in from New York where he was starting work on a project with Julianne Moore at the same time as developing a biopic about Princess Diana.

Sophia Loren and Orson Welles peered out from their gilt frames on the bar walls as a cluster of expensively dressed film executives milled about discussing distribution deals. Larraín sat hunched over his glass of wine in a plain black T-shirt, reserved, wary and watchful. “I just try to be neutral and disappear,” he said. A friend once secretly shot a video of him dancing alone at a house party, and Larraín was horrified to find out how awkwardly he moved. “I realised something of my personality in that dance: loneliness, fragility and some oddness. It was a description of myself.”

Some people mistake his reserve for hostility. Others chalk it up to artistic temperament. Yet it reflects more than just sensitivity. At 43, Larraín has spent much of his career feeling like an embattled misfit. He made his name with three films set in the 1970s and 1980s, when Chile was ruled by the right-wing military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew the previous, socialist government in 1973 in a coup backed by America. During Pinochet’s 17-year rule, more than 3,000 Chileans were killed and some 40,000 tortured, all in the name of fighting communism.

Larraín’s first two films about this era explored how its bloody violence seeped into people’s inner lives, and earned him glowing reviews in Europe and America. The third instalment, “No”, about the campaign to oust Pinochet, was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film.

Back at home, however, the trilogy sparked outrage. The uproar was as much about the identity of the director as the content of his films. Most of the leading members of Chile’s arts scene come from families that resisted the dictatorship – and paid the price in the form of arrest, execution or exile. Larraín’s parents, by contrast, were prominent supporters of it. Although Larraín himself opposed his family’s politics, many on the left felt he was building his career on the back of their suffering, making films out of stories that were not his to tell. “They said I was selling Chilean history and making a profit from our painful past,” he said.

After the success of “Jackie”, Larraín could have left Chile behind. The wildly experimental film he was showing in Venice indicated his stubborn refusal to do so. “Ema” is part domestic melodrama, part call to arms. It follows an anarchistic dancer with peroxide-blonde hair who lives in the crumbling Chilean port of Valparaíso. We meet her just after she has handed her adopted child back to social services and is embarking on a bacchanalian adventure of bisexual bed-hopping and reggaeton dance parties. When she isn’t ripping apart the fabric of traditional family values she is fighting an incandescent battle with public order, using a flame thrower to torch traffic lights, parked cars and playgrounds.

The film captured the repression and frustration that many young people in Chile feel – an anger that bubbled up into violent street protests in October 2019, soon after the film’s premiere. A director with a different background might have expected approval and acclaim from the country’s disaffected youth when “Ema” was released. Instead, Larraín was braced for more vitriol.

The heat and emotion of the debate in Chile over Larraín’s films echo arguments currently raging about cultural appropriation in America and elsewhere: who has the right to recount the stories of communities not their own? As Zadie Smith, a British novelist, observed in a recent essay: “The old – and never especially useful – adage, write what you know, has morphed in to something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.” Pablo Larraín has shown no intention of heeding that warning.

To Chileans, Larraín’s full name, Pablo Larraín Matte, signals two things: right-wing politics and big money. His father, Hernán, is a prominent member of a political party set up to defend Pinochet’s legacy, and now minister of justice in the government of Chile’s billionaire right-wing president. The Matte family is one of Chile’s richest industrialist clans (though his mother doesn’t come from the billionaire branch of it).

Born in 1976, the second of six children, Larraín grew up in a large house in a smart suburb of Santiago. The family spent their summer holidays on the wide blue lakes of southern Chile. Larraín’s father was a law professor, not yet formally involved in politics, but close to many of the junta’s leading figures. Among the illustrious attendees at a family New Year’s Eve party was Jaime Guzmán, one of Pinochet’s chief advisers and the architect of his constitution.

Larraín went to Colegio Apoquindo, an exclusive school “for kids with chauffeurs”, as he once put it, that was entwined with the regime – two of Pinochet’s grandchildren went to it. From behind the school gates the world looked simple. Santiago’s poor were a Marxist rabble who, given half a chance, would expropriate all the wealth. “There was huge paranoia that lower-class people or people from the left were going to take over,” Larraín said. Pinochet was their protector. Larraín remembers being told, and accepting, that the dictator had been forced to take power without an election because Chile was in crisis. The students’ sense of loyalty to their class and leader was reinforced through rituals: at the summer prize-giving ceremony pupils marched like little soldiers.

Larraín found the martial atmosphere “too mean, too tough” and was bullied. “The strong had a better life,” he said. “I was fragile.” Eventually his parents moved him and his younger brother – who now produces Larraín’s films – to a more liberal school. There Larraín escaped into music, books and, above all, film. To supplement the diet of American movies on offer at the cinema (“Back to the Future” was one of his favourites) he rented arthouse films from the Goethe Institute.

When it came to picking a career path Larraín rejected the prestigious universities other family members had attended and went to the University of Arts, Science and Communication in Santiago. The curriculum for his course, audio-visual communication, was “all about commercials and cheap TV”. His political education left a deeper impression. For the first time he socialised with the people he and his former schoolmates used to fear: ordinary Chileans.

Many of these students had family members who’d been tortured or murdered under Pinochet. Larraín began to understand not only the violence that other Chileans had endured but also the matrix of class, money and political thuggery that implicated him and others of his background. “The first feeling was shame,” he said. “When you realise that your privileges were protected by political violence, you realise that they come from a very dark place.”

As a university student, he read more and more about the crimes of the junta and confronted his family about their blindness to what had been going on: the torture centres and secret prisons, the mass graves, the bodies thrown from helicopters into the Pacific. Eventually he fled the privileged bubble he had grown up in. Aged 22 he moved into Barrio Brasil, a working-class quarter of Santiago known for its political radicals and down-at-heel artists. “Santiago is a segregated city,” his sister Blanca told me. “Pablo crossed to the other side.”

Despite the lasting political rift between him and his family, Larraín is reluctant to talk about them: “A bird who shits on his own nest is a bad bird.” He respects his parents’ open-mindedness over his upbringing. “I was able to go out and see other things thanks to the tolerance that they had.” In 2013, his father made a high-profile public apology for supporting Pinochet and “for what I may have done or failed to do”. These days, whenever he is back in Santiago, Larraín visits his family for Sunday lunch.

Chile’s artistic heritage is inextricable from the country’s history of left-wing struggle. Pablo Neruda was a poet and lifelong communist who served in the government overthrown by Pinochet in 1973. Víctor Jara, a folk singer and activist beloved by idealistic students the world over, was arrested and murdered by the junta. Roberto Bolaño, a novelist, was part of the resistance against Pinochet as a young man, ended up in jail and spent the rest of his life as a wandering exile in Mexico and Spain. Before Larraín, Chile’s most famous film-maker was Patricio Guzmán, who risked his life making a sombre three-part documentary about the coup of 1973.

In post-dictatorship Chile, political identity hinged not just on belief but community and tribe. To many people on the left, Larraín simply didn’t belong. “I represent that privilege, that class, that ideology,” he said. “They thought that someone from my background would never believe what I think. They thought my ideas were fake or irrelevant.” It didn’t help when his father was elected to Chile’s senate in 1993 as a member of the pro-Pinochet political party – and later became its leader.

When Larraín started making his own feature films in the mid-2000s he was still seen as being from the wrong side. “There was an idea that after the dictatorship someone who comes from a family of the right cannot go and make a film,” said Sebastián Sepúlveda, who now edits Larraín’s films. “Culture is for the left.” Larraín was shocked by the intense denunciation of his first film, “Fuga”, a messy and self-indulgent work about the travails of a sensitive musician from a wealthy political family. “It wasn’t just, ‘Your film is shit’,” said Sepúlveda, who didn’t know Larraín at the time. “It was, ‘This rich motherfucker needs to disappear’.”

Determined to face up to his own past, Larraín decided to make films that tackled the dictatorship itself. It was a decision that won him few friends on the left. As he ventured deeper in to the terrain, Larraín’s critics increasingly portrayed him as something more insidious than a child of privilege: he was a right-wing partisan in the struggle over Chile’s history. When he released “No”, the final part of his trilogy on the Pinochet years, a journalist for a left-wing magazine accused him of whitewashing the past for an international audience and of being a political stooge, “exporting the image of the country”.

“No” follows a young ad-man who is drafted into the anti-Pinochet campaign to devise its TV adverts. He is entirely apolitical, happily fraternising with figures both from the right and the left, and approaches the job of selling democracy as he would a new model of microwave. Rather than dwell on the horrors of the past to persuade Chileans to ditch their dictator, he opts for vapid positivity: people dancing in the street and eating picnics in the park, accompanied by a bouncy jingle. The campaign is successful and Chile returns to democracy. But it wins by treating that democracy like a brand of spaghetti. To those left-wingers who had spent years in the opposition trenches, the film seemed to depict their signature political achievement as little more than a triumph of marketing.

The uproar over Larraín’s movie showed how raw the wounds of Chile’s past still were. Whether in Santiago or Alabama, debates over cultural appropriation tend to flame most fiercely when historic injustices have not been properly reckoned with. Two types of accusations are frequently flung out. The first stems from an absolutist belief that no one from the privileged side of an oppressive system should portray those who have suffered under it (Guillermo Calderón, Larraín’s long-time collaborator, recalls a particularly pure example of this in the response to “No”: “I literally heard people say, ‘How dare he tell our story?’”) The second charge concerns how the story is told, whether the treatment is respectful or exploitative.

Larraín’s trilogy on the Pinochet years, which mixes the dark and the comic to unsettling effect, was deemed guilty on both counts. That he told the story was bad enough. His films also presented a bleak, cynical vision; his protagonists were not idealists fighting fascism or victims of its abuses, but squalid opportunists capitalising on a moral vacuum. The central character in “Tony Manero”, the first in the trilogy, lives in a poor neighbourhood in Santiago in the late 1970s. He is more interested in dancing than the dictatorship: his dream is to win a TV talent contest as John Travolta’s character from “Saturday Night Fever”, in the furtherance of which he goes on a killing spree. Larraín uses the perverse levity of a murderer who slaughters for the sake of disco as a means to depict the poison of the Pinochet years. “I was interested in how violence is absorbed by regular people”, he said, “and how it turns into something personal and private.”

Where “Tony Manero” was about how state terror infected the body politic, “No” was about how the referendum failed to cure the malady. It was the work of a disappointed leftist who regarded the victory of the anti-Pinochet “No” campaign as unfinished. “What they didn’t see is that I was doing farce,” he said. When Pinochet was booted out of power the pillars of the system he erected endured: his constitution persisted, albeit in amended form; the nation’s schools, universities and hospitals remained largely privatised; and Chile continued to be one of the most unequal societies in the world. Pinochet died free, and few of his foot soldiers have ever been prosecuted.

“In my country, both sides, the right and the left, came to a pact of silence,” Larraín said. “That is probably the most disappointing truth of all. Democracy was back, a lot of things improved. But the system, the heart of the system, is still there.”

OK, cut!” Larraín shouted as Julianne Moore removed a dead crow from a letter box. “Let’s do it again, a little slower this time.” On a bright autumn morning last November, Larraín was on set at a farm in upstate New York directing “Lisey’s Story”, an eight-part adaptation of a novel by Stephen King for Apple TV+. The location was a perfect distillation of rural Americana: a swing hung from a maple tree on the lawn and a path led down from a white clapboard farmhouse to the sweeping woods below. Crew members bustled about scattering fake autumn leaves to augment the real ones.

Moore had spent most of the morning walking up to the mailbox at the end of the drive and opening it to reveal its gruesome contents. Lisey, her character, is rebuilding her life and confronting the dark realities of her marriage after the death of her husband, a famous American novelist. His academic admirers are now circling, seeking the rights to his archive of unpublished work. The tussle has taken a gothic turn: the crow has been left as a grisly warning.

Larraín wanted a sharper sense of the battle between Lisey’s toughness and her creeping fear. During the next take, he left the camera rolling as Moore experimented with lines and gestures. As she pulled the bloody carcass from the mailbox, Moore’s horrified silence morphed into a quiet “Fuck, fuck”, which then became a breathless “Fucking fuck fuck” and eventually a tortured scream of “Fucking fuck fuck!” After another discussion with Moore, they decided on a further improvement: rather than using kitchen tongs, Moore would withdraw the bloody talons of the bird with her bare hands.

On set Larraín becomes a gentler, more spirited version of his usual awkward, prickly self. Talking to Moore he waved his arms softly, drawing a performance from her like a conductor orchestrating an adagio. In his early career he liked to plan every line and control every camera angle with precision. Now his cast and crew have room to play and improvise. He often rewrites scripts as he shoots – “Ema” began with no script at all. Working with Larraín is demanding but invigorating, said Alfredo Castro, who has appeared in several of his films. “In other films I have made, you are simply an actor and with each take you replay the lines. With Pablo you have the freedom to change them, to be a creator as well.”

This improvisational style lends Larraín’s films a rawness and edge which has given him a reputation in America as someone who shakes things up. Darren Aronofsky, who produced “Jackie”, hired Larraín because he wanted him to pierce the veil of reverence that has enveloped the Kennedy myth in America. Larraín recognises the irony. “Here I am considered a Hispanic, Latin person,” he said, “so I represent diversity for the people who hire me. Here I’m not considered white. But in my country I’m the whitest possible person.”

Larraín delivered a fearless and spiky take on America’s favourite First Lady. Natalie Portman gives a visceral performance as Jackie Kennedy, complete with snot dripping from her nose and blood and brains running from her hair in the shower. She consoles herself with vodka. The narrative jumps around abruptly from the Chanel-swaddled glamour of the Kennedys’ first days in the White House, the doomed trip to Dallas and the days between assassination and funeral. The story is framed by an interview Kennedy gave a week after her husband’s death, in which, with the help of a pliant journalist, she first rehearsed the idea of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, a realm of lofty principles and unimpeachable virtue.

Some of the film’s financial backers asked Larraín to re-edit it into a more conventional story, fearing that its kaleidoscopic structure would kill it at the box office. He refused. “It’s a movie about memory,” he said. “It’s a movie about going into the labyrinth of a broken heart…That’s why it’s in fragments.” He portrayed Kennedy not just as a widow and mother, temporarily deranged by grief, but also as a shrewd political operator who constructed her own image, and that of her husband, from the pieces of a shattered presidency.

That film gave Larraín a new sense of freedom. Even when not on set, Larraín seemed more at ease with himself in America, where he is relieved of the baggage of his background. “One of the reasons I like to be here”, he said, “is that I am here just by myself. I’m free, I’m on my own, and what really matters is my work. No one cares what my name is. They can’t even pronounce it very well.”

The next day, at lunchtime, the crew of “Lisey’s Story” piled into minibuses and drove to a nearby Korean church, the only place in the remote rural area big enough to accommodate them all. The church’s library had been converted into an elaborate canteen. A buffet bristled with crab claws and lobster tails, roast turkey and steak. A raven, which was going to appear in a scene that afternoon, stood on a perch eating cheesecake from a paper bowl.

Larraín sat at a table in the corner, pensive. Chile was alight. Violent street protests in Santiago had caught the political elite off-guard and had now spread across the country. Buses and buildings were being set on fire, and that week students had started to decapitate public monuments. “They are burning everything,” Larraín said. “It’s so strange and so beautiful.”

It was impossible not to think of “Ema”, which had received mixed reviews when it came out: some admired its pulsating energy and visual pyrotechnics, others expressed bewilderment at its convoluted plotting and sexual politics. Now, as demonstrations raged in Chile, the film took on an almost prophetic quality. “Pablo had this sense of what was happening, especially among young people and social outsiders,” Mariana Di Girolamo, the actress who played Ema, told me. “I don’t know if he is a visionary, but he was able to smell it.”

Ema’s incandescent protest seemed to flicker with Larraín’s own. At one point she torches a statue of a revered Chilean military hero from the 19th century – an act as radical as a Briton trashing a statue of Horatio Nelson. “He knows that some Chileans are going to walk out of the cinema at that point,” said Guillermo Calderón, Larraín’s co-writer. “But he does it on purpose to create a reaction. He wants to destroy these symbols of national tradition as a way of redefining himself.”

Later I talked to Calderón about Larraín’s standing in Chile today. He thought that the protests had vindicated the pessimism of “No”, the final part of Larraín’s trilogy: “Now a lot of people are seeing the process of the end of the dictatorship from the same cynical point of view that Pablo had a while ago,” said Calderón.

Calderón encouraged Larraín to take the job in New York after he had finished “Ema” to help him escape the gravity of the past. “When he’s in Chile he’s going to be fighting this personal war for ever through his films,” he said. Now he was worried about his friend being sucked back in. “With this crisis in Chile, all those ghosts are going to come back.”

As it turned out, Larraín was forced back to Santiago when the pandemic halted filming on “Lisey’s Story”. It is uncertain when the project will resume. Under lockdown in Chile he produced a series of shorts for Netflix called “Homemade”, recruiting directors around the world. He himself contributed a black comedy about a lecherous old man catching up with old lovers over Zoom. He has also continued to develop a biopic on Princess Diana, “Spencer”, which he hopes to start shooting once the film industry is back up and running.

So far he has resisted the urge to re-engage with the country’s dark legacy. Yet for Larraín, as for Chile itself, it remains the great unfinished story. He no longer cares what his detractors on the left think about someone from his background addressing Chile’s politics, he said. But even when he is drawing a line under the subject, the combativeness of his tone suggests the fight isn’t over. “I’m not allowed to talk about this? Oh, really? Are you going to be so fascist that you are going to tell me what I can and cannot say? Like, ‘fuck off’.”■

PHOTOGRAPHS ANDRE D. WAGNER

Additional images: Alamy, Music box films, IDS/Collection Christophel