When Saturday Night Fever opened in theaters in the U.S. in 1977 and went on to become the third highest grossing film of the year, the disco craze was near the end of its popularity. That style of dance music that started in the early 1970s had effectively played out its popularity by 1980. There were plenty of movie musicals with disco soundtracks that followed in the wake of Saturday Night Fever like Thank God It’s Friday (1978), Roller Boogie (1979), Can’t Stop the Music (1980) and Xanadu (1980) but nothing that approached the success of John Travolta’s breakthrough role with the possible exception of the belated sequel, Staying Alive (1983), directed by Sylvester Stallone with Travolta returning as the main character, Tony Manero. Flash forward 25 years to 2008 and Tony Manero is once again a cultural touchstone from the most unlikely of places – Chile. Directed by Pablo Larrain, Tony Manero is the tale of Raul Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a 52-year-old second rate entertainer/dancer who is so obsessed with the title character of Saturday Night Fever that he builds his nightclub routine around it and dreams of winning an upcoming Tony Manero dance competition. It sounds like the premise for a goofball comedy featuring Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, Paul Rudd or some other popular comedian but Larrain’s film, despite some moments of pitch-black comedy, is a dark and disturbing portrait of someone who is a sociopathic outsider in his own country and culture.
Raul lives in a seedy boarding house with the other three members of his aspiring dance troupe – Cony (Amparo Noguera), her daughter Pauli (Paola Lattus) and Goyo (Hector Morales). Raul spends his time rehearsing his dancers for their weekly Saturday night show in the boarding house’s café and preparing for a dance competition on local television. His single-minded obsession in pursuing his fantasy quickly turns deadly for anyone who gets in his way or possess items he wants and needs like jewelry to pawn or money to steal.
[Spoiler alert] For the most of the film Raul shuffles along like some dead-eyed zombie but only springs to life when he is dancing, murdering or running from government officials. His desire for perfection in his work is also constantly at odds with his desperate circumstances and, when he jumps off a small stage in one scene and injures his knee, he starts destroying the floorboards as if that was the cause of his fall. The irony of all this is that Raul’s dance moves are a pitiful imitation of his idol, but the locals seem to enjoy it as escapism from their miserable lives. And Raul is so immersed in his character that he often recites dialogue in English from Saturday Night Fever to his puzzled troupe members. He even goes to the local movie theater to watch the film over and over again but when he arrives one day to see that Grease has replaced his favorite movie, he winds up killing the projectionist and his wife in a rage. Raul then steals the film canister containing reels from Saturday Night Fever and studies the film strips later, alone in his room.
Raul comes across like an empty shell in most situations and keeps such a low profile that he is almost invisible among his neighbors. The exceptions are the two women in his dance troupe, Cony and her daughter Pauli and Wilma (Elsa Poblete), his landlady – all of whom are sexually attracted to him. But the joke is on them since Raul is impotent. At one point, Cony lashes out at him after he appears less interested in sex than in recreating the lighted dance floor from the John Travolta film. “The glass floor is the only thing that turns you on,” she rails. “You’re such a fool. He’s an American. You’re not. You belong here like the rest of us.”
Set in Santiago, Chile in 1978 when General Pinochet was in power, Tony Manero never directly addresses the abuses of that regime or tries to make overt political parallels between Luis and Chile yet an overwhelming sense of paranoia, repression and poverty permeates every scene. Raul is well aware of the dangers of being seen in public because Pinochet’s secret police are constantly prowling the streets, arresting suspicious people and executing political subversives (As a result, local crimes escalate and are not investigated). We see this play out in one chilling sequence where Raul is planning to rob a friend of Goyo, whom he thinks is a black marketeer. But the man is apprehended first by two officials who discover anti-Pinochet leaflets in his backpack and execute him in a rocky dumping ground. Typical of his predatory nature, Raul finds the body and steals a watch and a necklace that the officers overlooked.
Larrain chose to shoot Tony Manero in super 16mm and the dark lighting, muted colors and economically depressed areas of the city ground the movie in a grimly realistic milieu (The cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, has worked with Larrain on numerous films). On some level, the sleaziness of certain scenes and the often shocking and unexpected bursts of violence wouldn’t be out of place in some drive-in exploitation thriller but Larrain’s skill as a director transforms the proceedings into something hypnotic and compelling that is more of an aberrant character study than a plot-driven exercise. And Alfredo Castro, who co-wrote the screenplay with Larrain and Mateo Iribarren and is a well-known stage, film and TV actor in Chile, imbues Raul with a creepy intensity that will haunt you for days.
Larrain’s film proved to be controversial when it was first released, angering some reviewers with its grim storyline and intentionally ‘ugly’ visual aesthetics. Here are some representative excepts from notable film critics:
Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times:
“Larrain evokes the bleakness and oppressiveness of life in a police state with much subtlety even as he poses a much larger question about cultural imperialism.”
- Hoberman, The Village Voice
“Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s alarming Tony Manero–named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta’s character in “Saturday Night Fever”–is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.”
Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound:
“As played by Alfredo Castro, Raul Peralta is one of the most disturbing and intractably unsympathetic figures in recent cinema.”
Jose Teodoro, Film Comment:
“While the combination of an obsession with Hollywood fantasy and gruesome sociopathic behavior is blackly satirical at first glance, director/co-writer Pablo Larraín is clearly after more than cynical laughter. Raúl’s absurd determination to erase himself through the adoption of Travolta’s dazzling outfit and physical prowess speak to a desperation far deeper than that of any distractingly handsome 19-year-old Bay Ridge paint-store clerk. Wisely eschewing the fussily baroque mise en scène that marred his debut feature Fuga (2006), Larraín employs a dogged handheld/jump-cut documentary style that surveys acts of savagery with the same dispassionate gaze as his protagonist.”
Deborah Ross, The Spectator:
“This film is not a joy, and there is no joy in it, but it is powerfully grotesque and it will linger, whether you want it to or not. Give it a go, if you feel brave enough.”
Tony Manero was the first film from Larrain to bring him international acclaim, garnering nominations and awards from various high profile film festivals like Cannes, the Torino Film Festival and Mexico’s Ariel Awards. It was also the first movie in an unofficial trilogy set in Chile during the Pinochet regime, which also includes Post Mortem (2010), the story of a morgue attendant and his love for a cabaret dancer, and No (2012), in which an advertising executive (Gael Garcia Bernal) masterminds an ad campaign which helps oust the military dictatorship of Pinochet in a 1988 election.
You could say that one of Larrain’s most recent films, El Conde (2023), is a continuation of the trilogy with Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) depicted as a 250 year-old vampire but the movie’s fantastical premise and grotesque humor puts it in a category of its own. Certainly, Chile as a setting and subject continues to fascinate Larrain, whether it is a controversial social drama like The Club (2015), about a group of disgraced priests and nuns exiled to a small coastal town, or a biographical portrait like Neruda (2016), the Nobel Prize-winning poet. By the way, the excellent Alfredo Castro is featured in all of the aforementioned Larrain movies and their collaborations are as famous in Chile as the Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro films are in the U.S.
In an interview for Cinema Without Borders, Larrain even stated, “I have been working with Alfredo Castro for many years. I also was one of his students in a drama school, he was my teacher. I think he is an extraordinary actor that has something that I really enjoy, which is that you don’t really know what he is thinking. He is so light and dark, and he combines so many elements. He tells a lot without saying anything.”
Castro has gone on to win rave reviews and awards for other directors in such movies as Juan Pablo Felix’s Karnawal (2020), Rodrigo Sepulveda’s My Tender Matador (2020) and Felipe Galvez Haberle’s tense period drama The Settlers (2023) but his performance in Tony Manero still stands as one of his greatest and most unsettling achievements.
Larrain continues to impress as one of Chile’s most talented contemporary directors and has even ventured outside his country to make critically acclaimed films set in the U.S. and the U.K. Jackie (20160, his atypical, contemplative biopic about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following her husband’s assassination, was nominated for three Oscars, including one for Natalie Portman as Best Actress. Spencer (2022), which focuses on a Christmas holiday with the Royal Family and a miserable Princess Diana in Norfolk, England, was equally well received, scoring a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Kristen Stewart.
Tony Manero was released on DVD by Kino Lorber in June 2010 with no extra features. It is still your best option for viewing the movie.
Other links of interest:
https://screenanarchy.com/2008/12/tony-manerointerview-with-pablo-larrain.html
Cinema Sojourns 