No

The consensus favourite in the Quinzaine [at Cannes] this year was undoubtedly Pablo Larrain’s best movie to date, No, the finale of his trilogy on Chile’s Pinochet years (Tony Manero and Post Mortem being the others). Seeming at first to be a star vehicle for Gael García Bernal as Rene, a kind of Don Draper of his time as a masterful TV commercials maker, No emerges as an ingenious fable on the ways that modern politics have entirely projected their message and image through television. It’s an enactment of McLuhan media theories put into practice, but (again) as a comedy. Rene’s campaign of ads to urge voters to reject a 1988 national referendum to continue Pinochet’s position as dictator is viewed by Larrain half as a lightly attuned social satire and half as documentary—Rene is a fictitious composite, but the events actually did happen, and the TV ads are real, a dazzling array of archive material revealing pop-culture attitudes that mask the fact that Chile had endured 15 years of Draconian darkness, and was on the verge of signing up for more of the same…

Larrain’s video-drenched work stood out for its deliberately dated and even degraded imagery, informed by ‘80s television styles in Latin America (which, to North American eyes, most closely recall the ‘70s). From its TV-aping Academy aspect ratio, still the loveliest and most aesthetically pleasing of all big screen sizes, to its shot-on-U-matic, washed-out colour and shaky-cam, No is a direct contrast to the locked-down, 35mm widescreen images of Post Mortem, which strained from a certain self-importance.

—Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope