Tony Manero
Network Releasing
Directed by Pablo Larrain
Release date of DVD: 28th September
Screen Ration: TBC
The eternal Hollywood myth, the epochal icon of John Travolta, the disco music era: all relocated in the periphery of the empire, the violated heart of America Latina, and embedded into the mind of a man possessing none of his model youthfulness, athleticism, beauty and dancing technique. The epoch and the place (intrinsically ahistorical) where Raul Peralta pathetically and repulsively tries to resemble Tony Manero, better still, to become Tony Manero, and like the Travolta’s character to enfranchise his miserable self from social marginality and anonymity, is also where a ferocious dictatorship was thriving thanks to the biggest democracy in the world that helped to eliminate with terror and violence any form of dissent, poetical as well as political.
Raul’s story is as relevant as its background is, a background that the spectator hardly descry, this background is History, and one of the most accomplished elements of this film is precisely the perspective under which history is optically framed, almost casually, next to or behind a protagonist constantly en scene, ensued by an hand-held camera as obsessive as his distrubing object of desire. So morbidly implicated is the camera that at times loses the focus and yet never concedes vital room to his prey, pushing it against the walls of the city denying any liberating panoramic, on the contrary, any time it moves behind the protagonist is to show the oppressive proximity of the military repression in the polluted turquoise of a rotten sky where the star of Tony Manero shines on. Raul does not oppose the regime and yet is not an organical part of it, he nonetheless reflects the image of a sick society onto a deformed mirror, thus assimilating and unwittingly adopting the same ruthless methods, trying to achieve his egoistical ends through an indiscriminate use of violence overbearing any potential contenders.
Hermetically trapped into a solipsistic delirium that makes him extraneous to any form of affection, sentimentality, moral or human respect, to any future project whatsoever that is not the realization of his demential obsession. Raul simultaneously represents the triumph of indifferent individualism and the slavish product of oppressive systems, based on the repression of anything that is not conform, that is, the Other. Based also, as our beloved democracy is, on the colonization of the imaginarium and of consciences, and on the advocacy of uncritical conformism, the Pinochet regime transcends in Tony Manero the spatial-temporal coordinates to come to represent our rotten times concealed behind the edulcorated (yet violently false) façade of western freedom. Raul’s cloddish attempt at transplanting the American dance music on the Latin American tradition of dance involuntary mirrors the bigger picture wherein an oppressed Chile tries to forcefully adopt models inspired by western capitalism without any form of respect towards the socio-cultural specificities of its own people.
With his heart and brain drenched in the dirty putridity of ambition Raul wears an immaculate white suit; 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. The director stages with lucid cruelty a political musical disguised in the form of a social horror, choreographing, with very few means, an epoch ridden by fear, indifference, suspect; evoking a melting climate of moral void whose resemblance with our present (western) times cannot be casual.
Raul’s movements are deceitfully suggesting an escape, a cultured alternative to the moral illiteracy of his times (our times) but they soon sketch out a path towards homologation, loss and annihilation. Liberal inhabitant of an unhallowed world, Raul fetishistically worships a lonely dream-commodity, committing any felonious act to have it come through without ever realizing the innate deciduousness of its manufactured nature.
Violence and bamboozlement will pave the final path to shame, the ultimate spectacular bourn where the contenders, after having been incited to ape theirs idol are approximatively and humiliatingly sentenced to sordid glory or to the failure of oblivion.
Larrain’s project (carried out with Mateo Irbarren and the very protagonist himself, Alfredo Castro) posses conceptual strength and stylistic coherence, expressed through the predilection of a fragmented and paratactic narrative, with a dirty and affected chromaticism filling an inornate acclimatization. Laudable is the cameraman hand-held work (16mm transferred unto 35mm) disturbingly inhabiting the protagonists’ proximity thus obliging the spectator to intimately share Raul’s space of action, here we are next to him while he kills, sweats, tries to have sex, loots and shits…silent we stand.
This article is protected at the request of the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England and Wales