‘Start the week with a film: Why the thriller ‘Missing’ about 1973 is still urgent and relevant
Costa-Gavras’s film, about the coup in Chile, is available on Prime Video.
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Ken Loach’s contribution to 11′09″01, the anthology film about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, remembered a previous tragedy that had taken place on the same date. On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet deposed the democratically elected Salvador Allende in a military coup, ushering in a brutal dictatorship that lasted till 1990.
The savagery that marked Pinochet’s reign is already evident in the events described in Costa-Gavras’s Missing (1982). Set in the coup’s immediate aftermath, Missing explores the disappearance of American journalist Charles (John Shea) and the efforts of his wife and father to track him down.
Missing can be rented from Prime Video. Like Costa-Gavras’s Battle of Algiers and Z, Missing has a documentary-style narrative, thriller-level tension, and a clarity about political involvement that is absent from the films it has inspired.
Thomas Hauser’s investigative book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice serves as the basis for a movie that squarely implicates America’s involvement in the coup. More than the Chileans who pick dissidents off the streets at will, Missing targets the amoral role played by America in pursuit of its strategic interests.
After Charles’s wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) fails to locate him, Charles’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon) arrives in Santiago. Ed is a conservative, all-American businessman who is horrified to learn that Charles...
