TONY MANERO -Pablo LarrainNetwork Dvd By
Celluloid Liberation Front

07/11/2009

Eternal Hollywood myths, John Travolta´ s epoch-making icon, the disco music era: all this is relocated in the periphery of the empire, the violated heart of Latin America, and embedded into the mind of a man possessing none of his models´ youthfulness, athleticism, beauty and dancing technique. Hermetically trapped into a solipsistic delirium that makes him extraneous to any form of affection, sentimentality, morality and human respect, and that also prevents him from engaging into whatever project that is not the realization of his mad obsession - to be the winning Tony Manero look-a-like in a TV competition - Raul represents simultaneously the triumph of indifferent individualism and a slavish product of oppressive systems, based on the repression of everything that does not conform to them. While having his heart and brain drenched in the putridity of ambition, Raul wears an immaculate white suit; and as he is forced to exercise on a rotten wooden stage, he grotesquely tries to build a stage of colourful lights; defaced by hatred and blind violence, he aspires to the pure elegance of dance. Director Pablo Larrain stages a political musical disguised in the form of social horror, whit lucid cruelty and with the help of very few means, by depicting an epoch ridden by fear and indifference and by evoking the atmosphere of social void of Pinochet´ s Chile.
Larrains project, realized together with Mateo Ibarren and with the main protagonist himself, Alfredo Castro, presents conceptual strength and stylistic coherence, and it is expressed by a fragmented narrative method immersed into an improbable chromaticism and an unadorned landscape.
The cameraman hand-held work (16mm transferred unto 35mm) is admirable, as it insinuates in a quite disturbing way into the protagonist´ s activities thus compelling the spectator to share Raul´ s space of action and to be with him while he kills, sweats, tries to have sex, loots and shits&hellip and the spectator cannot do much more than standing silent.
This article is protected at the request of the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-non Commercial 2.0 UK: England and Wales.