100
IndieWire
The Pearl Button is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.
The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- France,
- Spain,
- Chile,
- Switzerland
- 2015
- · 82m
Director
Patricio Guzmán
Cast
Patricio Guzmán,
Raúl Zurita,
Gabriel Salazar,
Javier Rebolledo,
Cristina Calderón,
Claudio Mercado
Genre
Documentary
Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are also the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors, and also those of its political prisoners.
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What are critics saying?
100
IndieWire by Kevin B. Lee
The Pearl Button is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.
100
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary The Pearl Button requires patience but offers stirring rewards.
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor
This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.
91
The Playlist by Jessica Kiang
Guzmán's essential thesis seems to be that, in turning its back on the ocean, modern Chile lost a crucial part of its identity. But he also puts forward the extraordinary idea that the water has a memory, and that if you listen closely enough, you can hear the voices of the disappeared.
90
Screen Daily by Lee Marshall
Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.
90
The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold
A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.
90
Screen International by Lee Marshall
Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.
90
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.
88
Boston Globe by Peter Keough
As often happens in Guzmán’s films, The Pearl Button keeps returning to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of Chileans were “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again alive.
83
The A.V. Club by Noel Murray
A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.
80
CineVue by Patrick Gamble
Inhabiting the space between fact and fiction, where repressed memories often seek refuge, The Pearl Button weaves a fascinating, yet traumatic route through Chile's recent history.
75
Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo
Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.
70
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.
60
Variety by Jay Weissberg
What “Nostalgia for the Light” did for the desert, The Pearl Button is meant to do for water, but the deft melding of past and present that characterized Patricio Guzman’s earlier film becomes muddied here by the Natural Science 101 voiceover and an unsatisfying bridge between two rather disparate subjects.
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