Manero is the world-famous character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Raul, a 52 year-old thief from Santiago, is obsessed with him. Ricardo Larrain's second film is set during the week leading to Raul's appearance on a televised Manero impersonator contest. The time is, of course, the late 70s when Chile is under the grip of the Pinochet dictatorship. Raul assists an old woman who's just been robbed and, once inside her apartment, bludgeons her to death and takes her color tv. Did her comments about Pinochet's "pretty" blue eyes and Mapuches (Chile's indigenous group) being a "bad race" provoke him? No, we soon learn that Raul kills without compunction to get whatever he wants and the cops don't care. They are solely concerned with stamping out any sign of political resistance.
If movies are vessels to worlds to which we don't have access or windows that give us views of them, Tony Manero takes us where we've never been. Raul's pathetic little kingdom is a dingy 3-table luncheonette with a raised wooden platform in the back for dancing and performing. A fat matron who does the cooking, a younger woman and her teenage daughter, and an ineffectual young man acquiesce to the somber and dominant Raul. They rehearse for a weekly show they put on as Raul prepares for the contest and strives to replace the creaky platform with a glass one, lit from below like the one in Travolta's film.
A viewer could regard Tony Manero simply as character study set at a specific historical moment but most will probably draw a number of parallels Larrain seems to be encouraging us to make. Two strike me as particularly compelling. Pinochet and Raul are both amoral murderers who act with impunity and, secondly, Raul's sexual impotence mirrors the Chilean people's inability to present a unified front capable of ousting the dictator. Moreover, Raul's adoption of a foreign celluloid hero to emulate implies a loss of native identification figures at a time that Pinochet was importing American socioeconomic models ill-suited to serve Chile's needs.
Larrain serves up this pathetic psychopath of a character that somehow_ is it because of his fierce drive to succeed and/or the social context?_I couldn't hate. Ultimately, what makes Tony Manero particularly resonant is the rich interplay between its dramatic text and the sociopolitical context.
Tony Manero is a Lorber Films release.
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