I wouldn't have known precisely, except perhaps from the kinds of hair, clothes, and music tracks, that this story of a Chile country co-op takes place in the early 1990s, after the repressive Pinochet dictatorship has gone.A local audience may have picked up on this, but the filmmakers have deliberately avoided any helpful references. and, maybe because the younger characters grew up in a time when discussion of politics was dangerous, no one seems to be interested in talking about the subject.This can be off putting, as the otherwise mundane activites we see the people doing- playing music, making love, taking baths, putting out fires- fails to spark much interest.A much better film from Sweden, Together, made its portrait of the foibles and tensions in a communal group memorable.Here the co-op idea, which was apparently widespread in the years before Pinochet under the socialist Allende, is retested and that 6os-70s idea is challenged,but not in such an interesting way.A big black dog that keeps trying to escape looms as some kind of a symbol, though not as intriguing as the similarly used wolf in the Italian film Happy as Lazzaro, also from 2018,which I saw the same week as this one.
