Costa-Gavras directs Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek and John Shea in this true tale of a US businessman who must search for his missing son after he is lost in the Chilean coup.
These days if a movie chose American protagonists to revisit an international tragedy you’d assume they would have done so to make the film accessible / sellable to the domestic market. What am I saying? They don’t make films like this these days. Here though, Lemmon and Spacek have been chosen as our avatars to highlight the US’ complicity in this massacre and so the damn yankees can see with their own eyes just how cold blooded their aggressive Foreign Policy really is for distant ignored nations. Both stars are low key and affecting. Costa-Gavras convincingly recreates the death squad chaos, you get the sense of what a random oppressive dystopia a country under violent military rule is. And if every character is under constant threat, and naive to just how vulnerable they are “in the real world”, it makes for absolutely enthralling cinema. This has long been on my watchlist. Glad I finally had access to it. Legal challenges have meant it hasn’t always been readily available. Testament to its power, perhaps?
8
Check out my wife Natalie’s Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk
We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/
