Rojo is a baroque, offbeat movie about fascism. Although you might almost never know. It focuses on a small town lawyer, Claudio, who is comfortable in his provincial world, until one day a crazy man comes into his local restaurant and accosts him, before later shooting himself in the head, in front of Claudio and his wife. Claudio takes his body and ditches it in the desert.
There’s a kind of rumbling plot about whether Claudio’s action will be discovered and whether he’s guilty of anything really. An eccentric Chilean TV detective gets on the case, which puts the wind up Alfredo, but this is 1975 and the military coup is coming and fairly soon its going to be considered to be more or less legitimate to take out subversives without having to account for one’s actions.
This sense of creeping lawlessness is what underpins Naishtat’s film. He’s fascinated by the way in which polite society welcomes the breakdown of the rule of law, which permits both authoritarianism and corruption. Claudio gets involved in a scam to steal a house which has been left vacant by political victims of the state. A young man is kidnapped and disappeared by Claudio’s daughter’s jealous boyfriend. Everything starts to unravel.
The film presents a world right on the edge of a delirious insanity, where the light of day is eclipsed not by darknesss, but by an infra-red parallel reality, with perception warped into something out of a science-fiction film. (Literally in one sequence) What’s telling is that even those who stand to benefit from the arriving military coup are also profoundly unsettled by it, their world tilted off its axis, with any kind of madness now posited and possible. Fascism is a false prophet: the myth of order it disseminates might be popular, but it turns out to be deeply troubling for your state of mind and catastrophic for your sanity.
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