Power Play (1978)

Military coups aren’t nearly as in demand as they once were, why is that? The heyday was the 1960s, they really got into couping back then, and it remained hugely popular throughout the 70s. Like much else from those decades, there’s a retro trend that carries on the once-beloved genre to this day, but they feel a bit played out now, I think there’s only been about fifty coups in the last decade (shout out to Myanmar). Still, don’t be disheartened - fifty or so is enough to give a perennial quality to this serviceable, if sometimes draggingly slow, and notably low-budget conspiracy thriller. It’s a Canadian film, nobody has ever heard of it, and those two things are related, but had it been American, who knows if notoriety or obscurity would have followed? Any film that takes a pro-military-coup stance at least has political novelty, but perhaps the kind of novelty that compounds its not wholly unfair oblivion.

So there’s this country, no name, sort of implied to be Latin America but it looks more like Mitteleuropa where the population speaks with a salmagundi of American accents, Canadian accents and English accents (the latter provided by Peter O’Toole, David Hemmings and Donald Pleasance. The mixed accents are a challenge if you try to take the film seriously although you could show some Christian charity and salvage it as a Brechtian distancing device). And in this country, there’s a dictatorship and an underground resistance/terrorist movement and a secret police that uses torture on the terrorists they manage to catch (including water-boarding). So a group of generals take umbrage at all this, conspire to overthrow the government, arrange some jolly serious meetings, and the film takes their side completely. Not coincidentally, the film is far more captivated by the exciting How than the political Why but that effect would be (modestly) improved if they just picked a real country. Even pick the UK, make it interesting – have them talk about Westminster and London not just “the capital”, talk about Heathrow and Gatwick, not just “the airports”, and the M1 and the M6, not just “the highways”. At least say “La Paz” or something if it has to be Latin American.

When we get to the day of the coup itself, it turns into a sort of mini-action film, not bad for not much money, but still pretty ropey, and when we find out the much-discussed national airport is just one rinky-dink runway and the presidential palace is a rather nice mansion that is plainly in the middle of nowhere and not the middle of a capital city, the risible budgetary restrictions finally get the better of it. Then, just as we settle into the warm glow of a successful coup d'état, we get a twist-ending – surprise! Double the fascism, suckers – but even this isn’t presented as “maybe a no on the whole army takeover thing?” but rather a wistful melancholy for the more inspiring military putsch that could have been. Ah, alas, if only. 

The supposed political neutrality of the generals (before the twist) seems to have been thought of as vital to the credibility of the film, which itself strives to affect an aloof neutrality (or, at least, impartiality) toward the whole topic and doesn’t stoop to wanting us to be more, say, anti-coups than we were before we watched it. On such a topic, avowed indifference betrays at least some degree of enthusiasm and you don't have to peer very owlishly at this reluctant pretence before you detect a problem. Mask off, it is unmistakeably the opinion of Power Play that the seizure of state functions by the armed forces is a hearty colonic every once in a while and only tedious dogma would have it otherwise.

Because the perspective here holds so lopsidedly to a tough, Machiavellian, procedural factuality about how to get your coup on, the film declines to ask how a country would reach such a structural crisis in the first place or what it would be like to live through these events. But for all its curt pragmatism, it never really tells you anything you didn’t already like to imagine you knew about how to plot treason. It’s as vague as a script by, I don’t know, people who had no idea how this shit would work in practice and just handwave everything with random talk about “you’ll need tanks” and “I can lend you my trucks” and “we must strike here, here and here in a co-ordinated manner, that’s very important.” Anyone who sat down to take sinisterly purposeful notes might be surprised to learn that, based on this, the main strategic requirements for victory are that you look good in uniform and can snap at people as well as David Hemmings can. Tempting as it is to believe that, our remaining faith in this scenario meets its own coup de grace when the role of the press and TV is barely even mentioned. If you were indeed making a to-do list for the big day, "the whole of the media" doesn't seem like something you'd naturally overlook. 

All of which adds up to a strong case for the continued obscurity of this harmless little film by some good-natured Canadians who only wanted to make us aware that it’s the army’s job to step in when it doesn’t like the president because that’s how democracy is protected except on the off chance it goes wrong in which case ok it really isn’t.