El Conde (2023)

Rated R for gore, sexuality, nudity, swearing, blasphemy, and other vampire-related nonsense.  It's got a lot in it, but tonally it comes across as a lighthearted Wes Anderson movie.  Maybe because it is monochromatic and twee, the gore in the movie never really is all that gross.  Okay, there's one or two moments that are a bit upsetting.  

DIRECTOR: Pablo Larrain

In a different lifetime, I would have loved this movie.  It's kind of the reason that I don't revisit Bubba Ho-Tep.  I have to tell you, a lot of this is my complete lack of knowledge of Augusto Pinochet.  Ready for my knowledge of Pinochet?  He was a dictator who played by the dictator's handbook.  That's it.  That's all I know.  I know.  That makes me not the target market for El Conde.  I mean, sure, I learned a ton about Elvis and Kennedy from Bubba Ho-Tep when I was in high school.  (Not everything.  I know that it wasn't a documentary.)  But my goodness did I have a hard time connecting to El Conde.

The worst part is that I really thought that El Conde was going to be my movie this year.  I remember on Letterboxd when a bunch of people were posting about this movie.  They were my favorite breed of film snobs.  I aspired to be them. The sheer glut of posts about this movie meant that it was supposed to be something that i would brag to my non-film friends about.  "Oh, you saw Fast X? Well, I watched El Conde."  Then I would sip my wine and ride off on my burro into the sunset.  But no.  I'm apparently the plebian who can't really make heads or tails about El Conde.  Listen, I'm about to complain about this movie that is probably just smarter than I am.  Sometimes, I'll take a knee and acknowledge that a movie is just smarter than me and that's why it didn't click with me.  Instead, I'm going to try to defend my lack of love for this movie, mainly because I got the root of the story.

El Conde is one of those pretty movies.  It's up for cinematography, which I kind of get.  The image above?  It's the first one from the Google search.  It was just that pretty that I didn't have to scour for anything that looked visually stimulating.  But I have to make a comparison to Wes Anderson. Golly, the movie just gave me Wes Anderson vibes the entire time.   Pablo Larrain seems to me to be the guy who wanted to make a twee, tongue-in-cheek horror movie.  The thing is, I'm looking at Larrain's other credits.  These are movies that don't look like El Conde.  If anything, he's attached to two movies that I rolled my eyes at pretty hard: Spencer and Jackie.  He didn't direct Spencer, but I still harbor a grudge towards that film.  Jackie I kind of remember liking, but it was incredibly forgettable in retrospect.  But El Conde has a look towards it that almost seems entirely manufactured.  Instead of being the best way to tell the story visually, he imagined what it would be like to make an arthouse vampire film.  It almost seems like an homage to a kind of filmmaker as opposed to being a method of storytelling in itself.

The funny thing is, that visual style is the most appealing element of this movie.  It's very pretty to look at, even though most of the visuals are shooting for moments of irony.  When Pinochet flies out the window, it almost has that plane-on-a-string thing that Anderson does with his movies.  The reason that it really works with Anderson is because that is his authentic voice. Sure, there's that same tweeness that Larrain uses in this movie, but Anderson really is that person.  Larrain plays it like a tribute band...

...most of the time.  There are a few shots of this movie where that visual style seems really authentic and I applaud those choices.  When Carmen first gains her vampiric powers, she goes flying.  The joke initially is that she lacks control of her powers, making her first flight less than graceful.  But then there's this moment where we just enjoy her flight. She treats flight as something comforting.  She embraces her lack of control