El Conde – Snapshot
El Conde is described as a farcical black comedy. If making a smoothie from a still-beating human heart – and then sloppily drinking it as it spills over your lips and down your chin – is your idea of entertainment, then this movie is your cup of tea. (1.5*)
Where to Watch:
Stream: Netflix
Rent: (Nowhere)
El Conde – The Oscar Buzz
Oscar Nominations (1) / Oscar Wins (0) :
Cinematography (Edward Lachman)
Every year the Academy’s cinematography guild seems obligated to nominate one film that was done in Black & White. (I have more to say about B&W movies in the Special Mention section!). This year it is El Conde. Here Edward Lachman has pulled out the stops on B&W photography employing terrific use of filters, a full palette of greys, varying degrees of focus clarity, and even almost-beautiful VFX renditions of human flying using black and white film technology. One of the few reasons to see this movie is because of Lachman’s cinematography. He is not new to the Oscar world having been previously nominated for (colorized) movies Carol and Far From Heaven.
Director Pablo Larrain was not nominated for El Conde, but he did receive a Foreign Language Movie nomination for No, the first movie from Chile to earn a nomination. He has directed two actresses to Oscar nominations: Kristin Stewart received a Leading Actress nomination for her outstanding performance in Spencer, and Natalie Portman earned the same nomination for her work in Jackie. Sometimes a director’s work is evident in the performance of his actors.
El Conde – Related Movies
Other Pablo Larrain Films:
Spencer (21)/Jackie (16) (Direction)
Ema (19)/Neruda (16)/The Club (15)/No (12) (Direction/Script/Costumes/Vadell/Castro/Luchsinger)
Other Influences
Carol (15)/Far From Heaven (02) (Cinematography)
El Conde – What Others Think
El Conde is not a movie that the viewing public liked. Probably because of limited release, I don’t have a lot of audience ratings. But on two different scales they are very consistent in placing this movie in the bottom three movies of the year, only ahead of Napoleon and Maestro. (While Maestro was a worthy movie, I agree with viewers on Napoleon!) While one viewer called it “A Brilliant Work”, most of them gave it low ratings and comments like “Mainly Weird and More”, “For a specific audience” and “A dark satire”. It is, indeed, all of those things!
Critics, of course, often like the movies that audiences hate. So Amy Nicholson (New York Times) wrote “Pablo Larrain’s black-and-white horror spoof El Conde is founded on a ferocious sight gag…”. She gave the film a Critics Pick and found that the movie had “an easily digestible metaphor. We get it: Most humans are merely chum for the elites.” Carlos Aguilar (RogerEbert) lauded the movie as narrated by “An almost fairytale-like English-language voiceover (that…) drives this grimly amusing account…”. Aguilar notes “the alluring timelessness of cinematographer Edward Lachlan’s stark black-and-white images…”. Aguilar later notes what I think is the weakness of the movie in that “…its farcical tone goes for stylistic gustiness rather than a more meditative approach to its sociopolitical and historical foundation.” I don’t react well to farces – I generally find them lazy, cheap, and insulting. So it is surprising to me that critics put El Conde at the same ranking in this year’s movies as the Best Picture nominee, Maestro!
Overall, then, El Conde is one of this year’s films where the critics and the viewing public really disagreed about a movie. But even so, the audience dislike of this movie pulled the overall average down to just four from the bottom of all of this year’s movies – not a great endorsement!
El Conde – Special Mention
Black & White Cinematography – It seems to be a requirement that the Oscars recognize Black and White cinematography. At least as long as I’ve been doing this there has always been a B&W film nominated.
2024: El Conde
2023: The Tragedy of Macbeth
2022: Mank
2021: The Lighthouse
2020: Cold War
2019: Roma
All of these movies, except this one, have been really good movies. So what is it about Black and White visualization, that makes a film so compelling? In an article earlier this year from New York Film Academy, they argued that “black and white is a tool reserved only for the masters.” In part, usage of B&W is a throw-back, and an acknowledgment of the original movie format. After all, it wasn’t until The Wizard of Oz, quite literally, opened the door on color in movies in 1939, that movie technology could sustainably give us a complete visual experience. So part of the appeal to B&W movies is the element of nostalgia. We especially saw this in the prolific use of monochromatic color schemes in the film noir of the 1950s.
Most movie analysts, though, would argue that B&W also has an effect on the emotional response to the material. Because familiar objects, like faces and nature, are rendered in a highly restricted palette, B&W movies force us to actively engage our imaginations. And that heightens our interpretation, not just of the visual field, but also of the emotional message of the movie – we are forced, in a pleasant way, to work a bit harder to engage with a movie. If the movie is good, the result is an enhanced experience. In Schindler’s List, which was the first monochrome film to win the Best Picture Oscar, the lack of color demands that we see the horrible contrasts between good and evil, almost literally as a fight between black and white.
Although I am hardly comparing the emotional dynamics of El Conde to Schindler’s List, the choice of B&W cinematography in this film is illustrated most dramatically in the scenes where the vampires drink their blood smoothies, right out of the blender. While the appearance on screen is of a liquid almost black, our minds fill it in as the dark red that blood is supposed to be – we become almost an accomplice to the vampire’s blood-thirst.
El Conde – Michael’s Moments
The question that anyone thinking of watching El Conde must ask, is just how essential is it that you have the visceral experience of drinking a concoction made by putting a human heart in a blender on high – like a simple morning smoothie? And just how much are you into watching a young version of our main character, The Count, lick the blood off Marie Antoinette’s recently used guillotine blade? Or do you really want to watch black blood spatter as The Count saws off the head of his trusted butler? As my wife Joan summarized in her review of this movie: “It is just plain GROSS!”
I understand that the blood-lust in El Conde is intended to be farcical and a statement of dark – very dark – comedy. I get that there is a broader-themed message about the relationship between the ruling elites and the underling masses – this movie isn’t the first to compare rulers to blood-sucking vampires. And there is a certain amount of creativity in resolving the discrepancy between a movie mostly in South American Spanish being narrated by a proper English-speaking woman the way it is done here. There are some interesting elements in El Conde that film buffs might be interested in exploring.
But for most people, this movie is an over-the-top horror farce that is totally saturated in disgustingly-flowing black blood. I just can’t recommend this to anyone except confirmed masochists! (1.5*)
