We are in the drab outskirts of Santiago during Pinochet’s regime. Tanks patrol the streets. Inflation rages. Raul, a sallow 52-year-old loner, develops an obsession with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever.
He is hardly a dancefloor dandy, and doesn’t talk or smile much, but he leads a troupe of dancers who perform disco routines in a run-down café. He is also a psychopath: having helped an old woman home after she’s knocked down by some youths, he batters her to death and steals her television.
He sells the TV in order to purchase enough glass to recreate the illuminated dancefloor of the Travolta film and goes to the movies regularly to see his idol perform. When the cinema is showing Grease instead of Fever, he calmly bludgeons the projectionist to death. He is preparing to enter a competition to decide who is the best Chilean Travolta and nothing is going to get in his way.
Director Pablo Larrain, aided by a quietly compelling performance from co-screenwriter Alfredo Castro as Raul, is clearly commenting not only on a kind of celebrity fetishism. His focus is American rather than Chilean popular culture, but it’s also an oblique comment on the amoral traumas of the time. Perhaps it is Pinochet who Raul is trying to get away from?
Tony Manero
Cert: 18
