Although the material, and director Pablo Lorrain’s muck-racking  credentials, would beg to differ, No is no glum, morose drama. Far from it, in fact. It takes a shot of endorphins and battles the lows of the human experience with the highs of sharp, provocative filmmaking and an effervescent not-so-dark comic streak, tackling a serious subject and having a small, self-contained blast doing it. Kudos to Lorrain for following in the spirit of his main character and infusing politics with spunk and pizzaz, even if he runs into a few queasy moral calms along the way.

Slightly-diluted pop-grim aesthetic and rigorous commitment to handheld footage in tow, Lorrain’s scrappy spirit leaves Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet flustered and sweating, but not truly broken. This isn’t a dissection of Pinochet the man or Chilean democracy at large, even if the film makes its intent clear and its contemptuous spirit well-known. Instead, it has its sights set on the news media, and even there it has mixed opinions. That it finds warmth and lush buoyancy in this confusion about what to do with political pragmatism is perhaps a political and moral problem, but it is also inescapably the key to the movie’s success as vibrant cinema. Continue reading →