Is there a subtle gag at work here? This profoundly peculiar film, Chile’s submission for the best foreign-language picture at this year’s Oscars, concerns itself with a middle-aged man in 1970s Santiago who dreams of winning a competition to find his country’s most convincing John Travolta impersonator.
It does, indeed, sound like exactly the sort of film that might have won that most dubious of Academy Awards. One imagines a sentimental little drama about a kindly old fellow whose delusions lead him towards either one last glorious hurrah or a moment of tragic failure. Maybe his dog will die along the way.
From the moment Sergio Armstrong's defiantly grainy photography reveals the sinister Raul (Alfredo Castro, also the film's writer) lurking blankly in the doorway of the local TV station, it becomes clear that we are in very different territory. Consistently brutal and unashamedly grubby – get your popcorn down before the defecation scene begins – Pablo Larrain's film offers an unexpected combination of Stars in Their Eyesand Henry: Portrait of Serial Killer(with bits of Crime and Punishmentthrown in for good measure). It is rather brilliant in its ability to scale ever-greater heights of creative squalor, but what, exactly, is it about?
In between his efforts to prepare for the upcoming television show, during which a huddle of citizens will impersonate Tony Manero, the hero of Saturday Night Fever, Raul indulges in impotent near-couplings with a miserable quasi-girlfriend and her more optimistic daughter, frets about the state of his pristine white suit and chases the funds to pay for a glass floor in his local cantina. With the last objective in mind, he batters an old lady to death and, after eating some of her cat food, stomps off with her television.
Castro radiates an impressive anti-charisma as the deadened, psychopathic protagonist and Larrain covers his campaign of terror with appropriate documentary dispassion. It is, however, hard to discern exactly where the film’s political thrust is directed. Something is, perhaps, being said about how, in General Pinochet’s Chile, the brutality of the regime infected everyday life and how it poisoned commonplace morality. The director is, maybe, pondering the unsatisfactory nature of the compensations offered by popular culture.
Fair enough. But Tony Manerois so relentlessly fetid that it fast becomes hard to focus on anything other than blood, ordure and bad sex. It's a smart slasher film, but it's a slasher film for all that.
Directed by Pablo Larrain. Starring Alfredo Castro, Amparo Noguera, Hector Morales, Paola Lattus, Elsa Poblete
16 cert, Light House, Dublin, 97 min★★★
