In 1976 it is three years since the Chilean military coup that brought to power Augusto Pinochet. Carmen is an elegant, middle-aged woman living a comfortable middle-class existence: her husband is a doctor in the city, while Carmen herself remodels the family's seaside holiday home and does good works such as reading to the blind. One day the local priest approaches her: he has taken in a young man who was shot fleeing from Pinochet's forces; can Carmen, with her Red Cross training, provide assistance? Thus begins an adventure involving secrets, suspicion and frankly ridiculous code words ("Do you know where I can buy pasta?" "No, but they told me you can get guitars around the corner").
In this kind of film, a middle-aged woman makes for an unusual heroine and Aline Küppenheim gives Carmen a good sense of genteel bewilderment as she gets carried away by events far bigger than she. But the film feels slightly disjointed, almost as if it were originally devised as a series of webisodes which were stitched together into a wider film (Carmen fails to persuade someone - I think her son - to provide drugs in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen goes to meet a contact who does not turn up in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen loses her grandchildren in the woods in a sequence... you get the idea). I would certainly recommend seeing the film, but do not expect the 'taut thriller' promised by the 2022 London Film Festival programme.
In this kind of film, a middle-aged woman makes for an unusual heroine and Aline Küppenheim gives Carmen a good sense of genteel bewilderment as she gets carried away by events far bigger than she. But the film feels slightly disjointed, almost as if it were originally devised as a series of webisodes which were stitched together into a wider film (Carmen fails to persuade someone - I think her son - to provide drugs in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen goes to meet a contact who does not turn up in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen loses her grandchildren in the woods in a sequence... you get the idea). I would certainly recommend seeing the film, but do not expect the 'taut thriller' promised by the 2022 London Film Festival programme.