Chile’s Oscar entry this year is this quirky, unsatisfying oddity from director Maite Alberdi, co-produced by Pablo Larraín, and inspired by a stranger-than-fiction true-crime case from the 1950s. It is elegant and amusing enough at first, with some rackety humour that Alfred Hitchcock might have enjoyed. But it never really lands the punch it seems to promise; the intense psychological drama of single-white-female-meets-Ripley never materialises. A documentary might have served this material better, or a fiction feature that doesn’t have a made-up character as the lead.
In Chile in 1955, the entire nation was gripped by the arrest of bestselling author María Carolina Geel, who had brazenly shot her lover dead in the dining room of the plush Hotel Crillón in Santiago, apparently because he was in love with another woman. On top of everything else, the murder appeared to be a bizarre homage to an earlier shooting in the very same location: in 1941, surrealist poet María Bombal had shot her former lover (non-fatally) again in the Hotel Crillón, and was acquitted. Press and public opinion was in uproar over the Geel case and Chile’s Nobel Laureate poet Gabriela Mistral petitioned the president for her to be pardoned.
Alberdi’s film whimsically imagines a shy woman working as secretarial dogsbody to the trial judge; she is Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta), who is wearied by this job, and also by being a mother to two boisterous teen sons and a wife to a photographer who semi-competently runs a studio from their cramped and chaotic apartment. She finds herself fascinated by glamorous murderer Geel (Francisca Lewin) with her gorgeous, unencumbered lifestyle. The defendant’s apartment keys are among the personal effects being held by the prosecution; while Geel is being held on remand at a nunnery, Mercedes lets herself into this sophisticated flat and gapes at all the luxury. She tries on her designer clothes and scents, wearing them to work, and hangs around in the flat every night, telling her poor husband she is detained at the office.
And where does this all lead? To a violent obsession? A brutal exposure? A thrilling further crime? Not really, no; anything exciting happening to the fictional Mercedes would be difficult to merge into the historical record. So the movie subsides into a sentimental bittersweet sadness on the subject of the stylish murderer’s lawn looking greener than the one you’ve been tending. The inner life of Geel herself is untouched and Bombal, the first shooter (who was alive throughout this situation), is only briefly mentioned. A misfire.