Johnny 100 pesos

In addition to the crude division between good and bad films it can be useful to introduce other categories. Good good films are something we all like; we’re talking The Godfather, Fanny and Alexander, The Wild Bunch: that level. Good bad films are interesting in the ways they fail. Giliap springs to mind in this category. Bad good films come close to turkeys; they are best unnamed. As regards bad bad films, it is enough to look at the summer fare at the cinema.

We also have blockbusters on the one hand and little films on the other.

The Chilean film Johnny Cien Pesos, ”Hundred Pesos Johnny”, which I watched in a downtown cinema in Santiago in February 1994, in the middle of the Chilean holiday, is a very little film. But it is also closer to a good bad than a bad good film.

Johnny Cien Pesos is outwardly about five young students who get the brilliant idea to rob a bank. They enter the bank as regular customers, draw guns and threaten the clerks to empty the cashiers. Everything is done very nervously and amateurishly. Strangely enough, things go well for a while but when they are on their way out with the money the cops arrive. What now? The robbers withdraw and barricade themselves inside the bank. The trivial bank robbery has turned into a hostage situation. Radio and TV are on the spot and in front of cameras and microphones the robbers suddenly discover, to their own big amazement, that the robbery all the time really has been a political protest.

Suddenly screenwriter and director Gustavo Graef-Marino and co-writer Gerardo Cáceres have created a dramatic situation that can open and close in many directions. Basically it is about broke students who need money in a hurry. Not career criminals, not unlikable people, more like confused and with highly adaptable morals. Chile around 1990 is a society that has just left dictatorship behind but is still in the shadow of criminal rulers. What is most criminal, rob a bank or found one? And who are criminals in a society where the President is the greatest one? Shut inside this murky moral and political universe, the robbers in Johnny Cien Pesos sit with microphones and TV cameras pointed at them.

Many small, and good films start with a trivial crime. Roger Donaldson’s The Bank Job from 2008 is an excellent example. The small crime starts a chain reaction that develops in many directions. The robbers from the underworld turn out to be as good, and almost as bad as the upper crust in the House of Lords. Genre-wise it is a comedy, tragicomedy, with an insolent and disrespectful tone.

Such a film is also Johnny Cien Pesos. The mass media reinterpretation of the bank robbery as political protest creates large fictional spaces that the filmmakers can let the characters roam around in. During the transition from the military dictatorship also the Chilean authorities must ask themselves what is political fiction and what is criminal reality. Or is it political reality and criminal fiction?

During the solidarity work for Chile we inadvertently thought that the political refugees abroad would be received as heroes by the people fighting the junta who had stayed. Of course this wasn’t the case. Using the amateurish bank job, Johnny Cien Pesos shows in memorable scenes how the opposition between the home front and the foreign one was unavoidable, even if they agreed politically.

Judging from the filmography of Graef-Marino, Johnny Cien Pesos seems to be a One Hit Wonder. After this it has mostly been hackwork and TV. But Johnny follows its own logic until the last frame. In the meantime we’ve had a marvellous time and become a bit wiser, all this against the streets of Valparaíso as atmospheric locations. Kjartan Fløgstad