REVIEW - No

Mrs Page is taking nearly two weeks - she says it's only a week and a bit - to visit her family in the UK. While for most guys this would mean a punishing review of the house to-do list of fixing, painting and refurbishment, for me it presents an opportunity to remind the cats that it still requires a human to keep them fed and watered - even if that means the normally-avoided man of the house - and an even more important opportunity to watch all the TV and movies that are better enjoyed without the woman of the house around (and I don't mean smut).

With that in mind, I went to see a movie that her ladyship would avoid like the plague, because it's a) in Spanish and b) covers political history.

First of all, I felt a real outsider making my way to the front row of a theater packed to the rafters with Chileans. A Chilean speaker was introducing the film, and it was clear everyone else was there, not because their respective other halves were out of town, but because they had a personal stake in Chilean life and politics.

Augusto Pinochet was an army general and dictator of Chile from 1973 until transferring power to a democratically elected president in 1990. This film was a dramatization of creation and delivery of the advertising surrounding the respective campaigns.

It was decided that both sides - those who will vote "Yes" to extending Pinochet's rule, and those who will vote "No" to Pinochet in favor of freedom and a new direction - will be treated to nightly campaign communications created by mainstream advertising companies.

Gael García Bernal plays the left-leaning but otherwise non-political director of the "No" campaign, while his business partner is eventually picked to lead the "Yes" advertising.

There follows some mildly interesting slices of media life and the way the two sides play their angles. For the "Yes" team, that means heavy, officious content, while the "No" team creates advertising content the same way they normally produced their Coca Cola ads - all happy, smiley people and jingle-laden scenes of how happy Chile will be if they vote "No".

At the end of the day - and bearing in mind my level of interest: everyone already knows the "No" vote triumphed and Pinochet was ousted - the movie necessarily (I guess) looked like a bad 80s TV program, and played out with little drama.