Pablo Larraín's "El club" (2015) is a well-made film, but in the end it seems like a crowd pleaser for culture-freak cinéphiles. Not only did I find the subject a little trite (effects of sexual abuse of boys by priests) and gruesome, for all the situations that I witnessed that were truer, and sometimes as excessive and pathetic as the case shown here, during the 12 years I spent in a school ruled by Augustinian Recollects; but I also found there is a lack of compassion in its treatment of behaviors and the story, and a bit sensationalism and rudeness without necessity, when in cases like this of all sexual orientations, the most adequate keyword seems to be compassion. But in the end everybody has the right to make personal interpretations of such matters, although I still insist that there are too many stereotyped traits in the exposition of the victim and the victimizers. I do not know if what we see are consequences of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorial regime, but there is something crudely realistic, in morbid and sordid ways, in the characters and situations of the four films by Larraín that I have seen, in which we do not perceive the (also clichéd, if you will) joy of living that we all need to go on. And it's one film after the other, in which -- in spite of the masterful execution-- when they end, one would rather be dead and gone!
