Dir. Pablo Larraín, Chile/Brazil 2008, 97 mins
Cast: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Héctor Morales, Amparo Noguera
Review by Joyce Dundas
This film is about as scatological as you can get this south of John Waters, and just as watchable. It tells the story of one of life’s ultimate losers and his obsession with John Travolta’s enigmatic Saturday Night Fever character Tony Manero. It is set in the Santiago of 1978 under Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Raúl Peralta-o (Castro) lives in a depressing, lawless suburb in a greasy little room above a working men's club.
He shares the digs with a mother and daughter prostitute team, Cony (Noguera) and Pauli (Lattus) and a young rival dancer Goyo (Morales) who also act as his backing dancers. For these women, Raúl is a bit of a hero. His ageing Pacino-esque look, bad repetition of lines from Fever and the fact that he is the lead dancer gives him a celebrity status in their suffocatingly small circle. But make no mistake about it, this guy is one big loser.
He practices in his urine-stained y-fronts on a reclaimed glass-brick disco floor platform, a single bulb representing the lights, planning for the Tony Manero lookalike contest that he feels will be his ticket out of this nightmare life. His chance to be what he feels is an American success, which in itself tells you how desperate this guy is. He believes that Saturday Night Fever is more documentary than fiction and that, like his hero, his life can change if he wins a dance contest.
This 50-year-old man will stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve his goal to don the white suit and win. He needs some money, he bludgeons someone to get it – within the first few minutes of the film, in fact, in a shocking scene. When he needs some extra bricks for his glass floor, we know the scrapyard man is in trouble. This guy isn't a serial killer, he just does what he must to achieve his dream. There is no emotion in the murders, which makes them all the more brutal.
When Goyo, a much better dancer, buys a white suit to enter the competition himself, Raul makes the suit unusable, which is where excremental bodily functions play a very graphic part.
In the background though, there is always the atmosphere of the police state, including random killings in the street under the guise of political motivation. So when Goyo and Pauli dabble in revolution by distributing leaflets for an underground group they eventually bring the wolves to the door. For Raúl, this is just another obstacle he must overcome to get to his contest.
The film is shot like a fly that might buzz around Raúl's head, on his shoulder, landing on doors, sometimes out of focus, clever and irritating, but it always watches this scary story unfold.
In the ultimate irony the film’s competition dance-off culminates in a similar miscarriage of justice as happened in Fever and real life finally imitates art in the cruellest way.
Castro, who also co-wrote the film with Larraín and Mateo Iribarren, gives everything as Raúl, and it's a balls-out performance in every sense of the phrase. Larraín has said he wanted to show how in the 30 years between the film's setting and when his film was made, his country wanted to change its identity so much it is now living under an imported culture, that of America. As a study of loss of identity, at any price, the film is extremely successful.
This a good week for films not in the English language, with Let the Right One In hitting cinemas this week too. If you see just one subtitled film this year, see them both, ‘cause you really should get out more.
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