Plot
The film is not intended to provide an overview of this period in Chilean history. Rather, it shows the perspective of Gonzalo Infante, a privileged boy who catches a glimpse of the world of the lower class through Machuca, at a moment when the lower classes are politically mobilized, demanding more rights and forcing fundamental change. At the same time the upper middle class, including Gonzalo's own family, grow fearful of the growing socialist movement and plot against the country's elected president, Salvador Allende. Infante's sympathies, however, clearly lie with the poor based on what he has seen.
Gonzalo Infante attends a private school where the principal introduces 5 new, poor students. Gonzalo becomes friends with Machuca after he refuses to bully him while others in the class pick on Machuca. As the boys grow closer, they experience how each other live. Political unrest grows and political upheaval is imminent.
When the military coup d'état is launched which brutally represses poor and activist Chileans, including his friends and Father McEnroe, his own class status comes into relief. Moments after witnessing the murder of a lower-class young girl named Silvana by soldiers clearing a shantytown, Infante is nearly arrested himself. He pleads with the soldier to recognize that he does not belong to this shantytown. The soldier is only convinced after noticing Gonzalo's blonde hair, pale complexion, and more expensive clothing. Thus, Infante is forced to abandon his friend, using his class status as a free pass.
At the end of the movie, his family moves into a new, more opulent home. The audience is meant to understand, along with Infante, that this new wealth is connected to the brutal repression of the Chilean masses, who had hoped for real societal change by attempting to create a socialist society.
Read more about this topic: Machuca
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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