Chile, 1973, during what will prove to be the last days of the socialist government run by President Salvador Allende. Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran), a gruff but idealistic American priest, introduces children from the slums into an elite private school as part of a well-intentioned but controversial experiment. Eleven year old Gonzalo (Matias Quer), who comes from a wealthy middle class neighbourhood, befriends Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) who lives in an illegal shantytown nearby. While Gonzalo’s own family seem almost casually corrupt, he soon warms to Pedro’s boisterous clan, particularly Silvana (Manuela Martelli), the cute, flirty and slightly older girl next door on whom both boys have a crush. It is not long however before the underlining tensions between rich and poor explode into violent unrest. After General Pinochet seizes power in a military coup, the children’s world changes forever.
There is a strong cinematic tradition of tales of socio-political unrest told through a child’s point of view, possibly because their youthful naivety mirrors the hopes of revolutionaries hoping to build a brighter future. Just as childhood ends, so too do the dreams of political idealists crash and fall with disheartening regularity. A personal film for Andrés Wood, Machuca draws on some of his real life experiences but is not directly autobiographical. The film harks back to Au Revoir les Enfants (1987) and stages an explicit homage to that widely-praised Louis Malle in a later scene where young Pedro bravely bids farewell to the departing Father McEnroe. He pays a heavy price for a seemingly innocuous gesture. Some familiarity with Chilean political history might benefit viewers, given the film more or less throws us in at the deep end without much in the way of background information. However, the plot proves so compelling and the politics so easy to grasp that most viewers will be swept along by the exuberant pace.
Wood cannily pairs the fervour of socialist idealism with the giddy rush of adolescence as Gonzalo finds catchy Marxist chants and protest marches as exciting as getting drunk at his big sister’s birthday party with all her swinging Seventies friends, or sharing their first kiss with Silvana, laced with a slurp of sticky sweet condensed milk. His family cling defiantly to their staunch capitalist ways. None more so than his glamorous mother, Maria Luisa (Aline Küppenheim), who sleeps with wealthy men including the suave, elderly Roberto (Federico Luppi), in return for black market goods and later, increased social status. Gonzalo’s father (Francisco Reyes) is equally corrupt and helps himself to the ration stores, stealing precious food set aside for impoverished families. Crucially however, neither of these characters are bad people per se. Each exhibits a streak of decency, but remain morally weak. When parents turn against Father McEnroe, it is Pedro’s mother who delivers an eloquent rebuttal of their bourgeois selfishness. She is promptly shouted down by the middle class mob. The rise of Pinochet allows those lacking in moral fibre to rise to the top, while all the decent are doomed. However, Wood wisely does not sentimentalise the poor. Pedro’s drunken deadbeat dad is good for little beyond self-righteous whining, while Silvana’s ugly confrontation with Maria Luisa springs as much from the former’s fiery temper as the fraught situation.
The first flicker of civil unrest comes one night when Gonzalo glimpses people snatching dogs off the street, presumably for their meat. After Pinochet seizes power, the army invades the school. A no-nonsense Colonel usurps Father McEnroe as principal and effectively installs a dictatorship in the classroom. Kids with long hair are shaved, poor kids are expelled, anyone who says or does anything even vaguely subversive vanishes without a trace. First love is quashed with a bullet through the heart and Gonzalo is forced to snub his friends to save his own skin. It is a bleak, gut-wrenchingly honest finale, liable to haunt the viewer as much as Gonzalo undoubtedly carries the consequences of his actions into adulthood.
