Tony Manero

Some­times a movie plays one way on the screen, before meta­mor­phos­ing into some­thing alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent in the mind’s eye. Sat­ur­day Night Fever, for exam­ple, is a bleak tale of youth­ful feck­less­ness, blue-col­lar dis­sat­is­fac­tion, unwant­ed preg­nan­cy and date rape, where the Amer­i­can Dream is exposed in its most nar­cis­sis­tic and nar­row-mind­ed form. 

But so beguil­ing were the moves of Tony Manero (played by a young John Tra­vol­ta) on the dance­floor and so funky were the Bee Gees’ accom­pa­ny­ing songs on the sound­track that the film quick­ly entered the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness as a sort of show­case of all that was icon­ic (and good) about the dis­co scene – and about the ​’70s more generally.

In Tony Manero, Raúl (Alfre­do Cas­tro) too has been blind­ed by the daz­zling glit­ter­ball of Sat­ur­day Night Fever. And so he sets out to imper­son­ate Manero and to reen­act his hero’s night of chore­o­graphed glo­ry, obliv­i­ous to the dis­co king’s short­com­ings, as well as to his own. An apo­lit­i­cal, bare­ly lit­er­ate 52-year-old dur­ing the Pinochet dic­ta­tor­ship, he leads a dance group for a small bar on the out­skirts of San­ti­a­go, even more squalid and sleazy than the Brook­lyn night­club where Manero struts his stuff – and he will not let any­thing or any­one stand in the way of his obses­sive recre­ation of Manero, so that he ends up also reen­act­ing the vio­lence and ter­ror of his own country.

Raúl enters a pop­u­lar Chilean tele­vi­sion com­pe­ti­tion as a Manero looka­like, but view­ers famil­iar (as Raúl him­self, in his 1978 set­ting, can­not be) with Bri­an De Palma’s Scar­face (1983) will also notice his uncan­ny resem­blance to Al Pacino’s white-suit­ed Tony Mon­tana. This is hard­ly coin­ci­dence – for like Mon­tana, Raúl is a ruth­less­ly dri­ven psy­chopath, even if, amidst a back­drop of polit­i­cal repres­sion, dog-eat-dog law­less­ness and state-con­duct­ed mur­ders, his psy­chosis hard­ly sets him apart.

So while direc­tor Pablo Lar­raín makes every­thing in Tony Manero (includ­ing the cam­era) orbit around Raúl, there’s always the sense that the man embod­ies the malaise at the heart of a nation, where dreams are as lim­it­ed as free­dom, where cul­ture is slav­ish­ly imi­tat­ed from abroad, and where iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry are things to be dis­guised or denied.

Larraín’s film­mak­ing style is so calm and unsen­sa­tion­al – shab­by even, much like the griz­zled pro­tag­o­nist and his troupe – that moments of sex­u­al explic­it­ness, homi­ci­dal vio­lence and trans­gres­sive out­rage bare­ly reg­is­ter, leav­ing view­ers feel­ing as numb to it all as the char­ac­ters them­selves. Yet even though Raúl may be try­ing to live a bor­rowed dream, Lar­raín refus­es him (and us) the desired Hol­ly­wood end­ing, so that the final scene here (unfold­ing on a San­ti­a­go bus) con­cen­trates all the film’s inner ten­sions into a moment of unbear­able (and unre­solved) sus­pense. It is, in all its incom­plete­ness, a per­fect dénoue­ment to a dif­fi­cult film.