The Club
Feted for his examinations of public figures at historic junctions (SPENCER, JACKIE, NERUDA), Chilean writer-director Pablo Larraín explores another kind of reckoning in THE CLUB. A remote coastal town hosts a small community of disgraced Catholic priests, most with secret pedophilic pasts. Like some clerical branch of the witness-protection program, these exiled misfits appear relatively content until the arrival of two outsiders trigger a series of violent ruptures. Shot in stylishly murky colors by Larraín’s regular cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, this purgatorial parable won international acclaim and the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
Alfredo Castro, Roberto Farías, Antonia Zegers
- NOTES from Sebastián LelioI begin with the disclosure that Pablo Larraín is a friend whom I hold dear and have grown with. I have always admired his filmography, but there are many extraordinary things about THE CLUB: managing to make a movie with very few resources yet filmed with great intelligence and strategy; achieving an emotional intensity that is exceptional; plus, creating a film that stands out in the spectrum of Latin-American cinema for its precision and ability to see where no one wants to look. He sees the trash under the carpet and films it with the dedication of someone deeply interested in the dynamics they are portraying. Somehow that “club” and the unjust, pathetic refuge of priests…there is a connection with how impunity operates in Chile. Delving into that subject, and doing it with a touch of genre while reaching peaks of emotional intensity, is a tremendous achievement. Pablo is capable of capturing something horribly beautiful. He always performs a sweet judo move on the viewer, leaving them feeling good and bad at the same time, and the desire to walk that dangerous edge, through a territory full of traps that Pablo walks in his movies, is something I admire and am grateful for.
