No

This slice of historical fiction focuses on the 1988 Chilean “plebiscite” when international pressure forced the reigning dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, to hold a vote to determine if he would be given another 8-year term as President. The campaign consisted of 27 nightly, half-hour TV advertisements where each side, “YES” and “NO,” had 15 minutes to present its point of view. Gael García Bernal plays a cutting-edge, ad-man who essentially creates the modern approach to political campaigning, where advertising techniques “sell” candidates and ideas to the voting public as if they were products. This is an upbeat story, as we all want to see democracy triumph over a dictator, but with a depressing theme, as the victory is bittersweet in that the style-over-substance campaign works so well and has become the template for pretty much every political campaign since.

Director Pablo Larraín shoots the entire film on the 3/4 inch video stock that was the standard for news and TV in Chile (and much of the rest of the world) in 1988. The look of this format, with its 1.33:1 aspect ratio, allows the archival video clips to integrate seamlessly into the body of the movie. Shooting an entire film in this Low-Def style is an adventurous and effective choice, but it also accentuates a few of the things that don't work so well in the film, such as the somewhat contrived, faux-documentary style, which isn't good at conveying the progression of how the “NO" campaign gets designed and executed. Also, the film drags in several places, and the visual look doesn't help that at all.

Still, this is a good movie and certainly one that provides much food for thought in our current political climate. It is also interesting coming out the same year as both Lincoln, another historical film about an important political campaign, and Argo, another period piece that looks and feels like it could have been made in the era it is depicting. Like both of those films No was nominated for an Oscar—Best Foreign Language fil—though it did not win.