Film Review: No (2012) by Pablo Larraín

May 2021

Text by Ignacio Hitters

 “First of all I wanted to mention that what you're going to see now is in line with the current social context. We believe that the country is prepared for communication of this nature. Let's be honest: Chile is thinking about its future today.”

In 1988, Chile was in turmoil. After fourteen years of having Pinochet as the country’s de-facto leader, other countries started questioning the government’s legitimacy, calling for real democratic elections. With international pressure causing all eyes to be on him, Pinochet called for a referendum that would determine whether or not he was staying in power for eight more years. This meant that for the first time in over a decade of an authoritarian regime, the opposition was to have a true voice. Directed by Pablo Larraín (Chile, 1976), this is the story of the “NO” campaign, its team of talented producers and their inconsistencies. Some of it really happened, some of it didn’t. But, as the movie implies, that doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters is the content of the message, who hears it, and how it’s interpreted by the masses.

The story follows René (portrayed by Gael García Bernal), a thirty-something publicist in Chile who specializes in television advertisements. He leads a comfortable lifestyle in a nice neighborhood with his child. His ex-wife, Verónica (Antonia Zegers), is very different to him, being a political activist who, in such a regime, gets beaten and arrested regularly. One day, René is given an opportunity of a lifetime - to lead the campaign for the opposition’s side in Chile’s 1988 referendum. However, he is skeptical. Working on the campaign comes with a lot of stigma from those who surround him at his agency, including his boss, and the possibility of ruining the easy-going life he’s been having. Actually, he doesn’t even know if the elections will actually be legitimate or not, believing that they probably won’t be. In what could have been perceived as possible career suicide, he ended up taking the job, and the rest is history.

 Well, fake history, that is. Truth is, René’s character never existed in real life, but the campaign did. In fact, a lot of the propaganda shown from the campaign are shot-for-shot remakes of the original tapes, the ones that people were seeing in TV back in ‘88. By making the only true events in the movie the ones that were actually seen on TV, the film is at the same time making a statement on the power of media as a whole, on how what people perceive is way more important than what actually happens.  First impressions are important. Colors are important. Style can (sometimes) be more important than substance. Happiness sells more than fear. Humor sells more than seriousness. Simplicity is (usually) better than complexity. And the wider the audience, the more general one has to be with such concepts. Summing it up in fewer words, advertisements and propaganda are way more similar than one would think. 

What makes NO such a strong statement of a movie, actually, is the fact that it does not focus on Pinochet’s regime itself. It would have been easier to do a movie on all of the atrocities the military dictator had committed - those are very well documented and quite shocking to say the least. Of course, these themes appear in the movie, as they should, but Larraín’s work is actually about the challenge of changing the meaning of a word: from “NO” to so much more than just two letters. It’s a movie about the understanding of what sells and what doesn’t sell, and probably the best movie I’ve seen on this subject. 

A major plot point, as well, is how the key players in both the YES and NO campaign are quite close between each other, with the leader of the YES campaign being René’s boss and even helping him out, for example, to bail out René’s ex-wife when she gets arrested (again). As both of these characters come from a position of privilege, the politics in the middle are kind of bullshit to them anyway for at least the first half of the movie. The most interesting points in their rivalry come from their propaganda war. Both of them want to win, not only because the stakes are very high, but also because the one who wins, is most definitely the better one at their job. Superiority comes in many forms, and in this case, the ability to have a better understanding of the masses is the form of superiority. 

In the midst of it all, we have René’s relationship with his ex-wife Veronica as a subplot. While he doesn’t share her “passion” about the political movement she’s involved in, he does respect her a lot, and is still in love with her. A part of René is actually doing the NO campaign in order to impress Veronica and recover what he once had - a true family. And whether he gets to do this or not comes down to either winning or losing the campaign (at least to him it does).  It is kind of implied that while Veronica has a much more naive vision on all the events, she is definitely happier with her life than René is, even if René has a bigger house or a nice car. Who’s to say one lifestyle is better than the other one?

The first time I watched this movie, I had this urge to search for all of the original propaganda of both the YES and NO referendum campaigns, and to my amazement, I realised that they’d been surprisingly faithful to them when making the film. Many of the shots, actually, look so similar that it’s hard to tell which is which. This is not only major kudos to Larraín, but also to Sergio Armstrong, the cinematographer and photography director. Stylistically, the work has an undeniable 80’s visual vibe, as they added some grain and saturation post-production in order to give it a VHS spice. It took me some time to get adjusted to this, but I think it ended up adding to the whole vibe of the thing. In fact, after the post-production editing choices they took, it’s very hard to distinguish between the original tapes added into the mix, and the rest of the movie. I think this adds to another point Larraín was trying to make. History is written by the winning side, regardless of who’s right and wrong. In this case, the team shown was definitely on the right side of history, but the motivations behind it can be more complex than they seem. As long as they’re doing something good for society as a whole, do the true reasons behind it even matter?