You simply cannot move for high-profile elections lately. The UK’s big decision day is less than three weeks away; France called one last week in the wake of the EU election; my home country of South Africa had a particularly momentous one last month; Mexico just elected its first female president; and the US presidential face-off looms ominously ahead in the autumn. This can be easier to appreciate when you’re not emotionally invested in the outcome, but elections are irresistibly dramatic events, with all their inbuilt narratives of expectation and upset, triumph and downfall – so it’s no surprise that film-makers frequently seize on them.
Hollywood, in particular, is fixated on the vastly tiered labyrinth of American electoral systems, from the trivial to the most high ranking. Alexander Payne’s gleefully acidic teen comedy Election may seem a modest portrayal of a student council vote in a suburban high school, but it deftly distils all the manners, mores and strategies of grownup US politics into its showdown between a chilly overachiever and a trumped-up doofus. (Another school-based electoral comedy, Napoleon Dynamite, is perhaps less perceptive, but no less entertaining.)
Moving into scarcely more mature territory, the seven-minute 1932 short Betty Boop For President (Internet Archive) saw the famous cartoon bombshell running successfully for president on a rather simple centrist manifesto promising efficient street cleaning and mass rain cover, though there’s a hint of anti-Prohibition spirit to her victory. Still, she stands for more than Charlize Theron’s presidential candidate in Long Shot. A likable romantic comedy that claims some progressive cred by reversing traditional gender dynamics with its love story between Theron’s alpha female and Seth Rogen’s schlubby aide, it’s also careful not to state which party she represents, or what exactly her politics are.
That vagueness is common in Hollywood political films, loath as they are to repel half a polarised population – back in 1962, John Frankenheimer’s brilliant The Manchurian Candidate was a notable exception, with its feverish pile-up of brainwashing and gaslighting in the campaign of a Republican vice-presidential candidate plainly modelled on Joseph McCarthy. (Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake was a little more circumspect on that front.) Jeremy Larner was a speechwriter for a different McCarthy, five-time presidential candidate Eugene; he won an Oscar for later writing the pointed 1972 satire The Candidate, starring Robert Redford as the no-hoper Democrat running in a seemingly unwinnable California senatorial race, slowly turning the tide as he modifies his idealistic leftwing message. It bristles with first-hand authority and anger.
In the Clinton era, Barry Levinson and David Mamet’s nimble satire Wag the Dog got a boost from the uncanny timing of its release one month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke – an ideal coincidence for a film about spin doctors fabricating an overseas war to distract from a presidential sex scandal weeks before the election. By the time the actually Clinton-inspired comedy Primary Colors (BBC iPlayer) came out the next year, lightly fictionalising his presidential campaign, it didn’t seem quite as edgy – though Elaine May’s screenplay still had plenty of wit.
British elections, on the other hand, have rarely tempted film-makers – too dour and formal, perhaps. Back in 1959, Sidney Gilliat’s featherweight romantic comedy Left, Right and Centre built a rare fiction around a Tory-Labour contest, though it can currently be found only on DVD. The 2021 horror film Election Night, set around a viewing party for an election pitched rather fancifully between radical-left and far-right parties, has novelty on its side, if not much else. As for British election biopics, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to revisit the negotiations between David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown after the 2010 vote, but if you do, Coalition (Amazon) has your back.
Chile gave us one of the great campaign dramas in No, Pablo Larraín’s riveting, darkly funny and finally rousing portrayal of the political machinations behind the country’s 1988 referendum that ended the rule of Augusto Pinochet. Staying in South America, Petra Costa’s urgently impassioned documentary The Edge of Democracy (Netflix) leaves one’s spirit rather less lifted with its account of the circumstances building to Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential victory.
The rough-and-tumble of African electoral politics, meanwhile, has been superbly covered in a pair of recent docs: Sam Soko’s Softie, about an idealistic Kenyan journalist turned activist turned candidate, and last year’s Oscar-nominated Bobi Wine: The People’s President, in which a Ugandan pop star fights the power. Finally, the excellent, little-seen Indonesian film Autobiography (BFI Player) traces a relationship of toxic influence between a corrupt, military-minded mayoral candidate and his young assistant – an election film with all the atmospheric tension and unease that’s harder to enjoy in a real-life context.
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