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.
