The primacy of political order

HE IS the unlikely protagonist of a wannabe blockbuster: a balding, pudgy, jug-eared shopkeeper. The plot is just as unlikely: outside, the young protesters marching down the avenue clamouring for equality and freedom; inside, the middle-aged sandwich-maker struggling to keep his shop from being vandalised yet one more time.

You would not have guessed it: the unglamourous shopkeeper turns out to be the good guy, and the glamourous demonstrators, biceps glistening and flags aloft, are the bad guys. Petty bourgeois values (“I am fighting to defend my little hole in the wall, my only source of income,” mutters the protagonist) carry the day.

The film, entitled La Fuente (The Fountain), to be released later this year, neatly encapsulates the evolution of public opinion in Chile over the last five years.