The Man in the White Suit: Tony Manero

TONY MANERO
(Pablo Larraín, Chile/Brazil, 2008, 

95 minutes)

"Al Pacino! 

Attica! Attica! Attica!"
--Tony Manero 

(John Travolta)

***** ***** ***** *****

As played by John Travolta, the Tony Manero of John Badham's 1977 Saturday Night Fever was a 19-year-old Brooklyn stud with a penchant for white suits and black shirts. As played by Alfredo Castro, the Raúl Peralta of Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero is a 52-year-old Santiago stud-wannabe with a penchant for white suits and black shirts.

In Badham's cultural touchstone, the lanky lead imagined himself as a disco-dancing Al Pacino: tough, but smooth (note the Serpico poster on his wall). Compact, wiry Raúl, on the other hand, actually looks like the Pacino of a decade ago--before the eye work and the curiously orange complexion. If he isn't exactly smooth, he's tougher than the preening Tony ("Watch the hair!"), because this aspiring entertainer doubles as a brutal killer.

In his second feature film, Larraín establishes Raúl's contradictory nature in brief, but effective brushstrokes: Peralta's obsession with Saturday Night Fever in 1978 provides a release from the unrelenting gloom of life under dictatorial President Augusto Pinochet, while his lethal escapades allow him to eliminate rivals and to obtain goods he couldn't otherwise afford.

As with Pacino's Tony Montana, Travolta's blue-collar Manero wasn't born to wealth either, but he worked for his money. As Raúl's junkyard associate tells him, "Things cost what they cost, not what you want them to cost," sensible words that mean nothing to a cold-blooded sociopath. When Raúl decides that his performance space needs a lighted-glass floor and a mirror ball, in order to recreate Fever's 2001 Odyssey in miniature, he finds some cruelly creative ways to make it happen (he and his three-person troupe live in the apartments above the cantina where they dance the nights away).

Further, he doesn't lack for female companionship, but like Warren Beatty's infamous bank robber in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Raúl's impotence extends to his entire existence. Unlike Clyde Barrow, however, his appeal for the opposite sex strains credibility. The low-rent Pinochet of his barrio, he's cold and grubby, and neither charms nor satisfies the ladies in his life, which seems to be Larraín's deeply cynical point. i.e. that the Chilean dictator's antipathy acted as an aphrodisiac on his more masochistic citizens.

Though he's in nearly every frame, trained stage actor and co-writer Castro gives an otherwise vanity-free performance. If most antiheroes have one or two compensating qualities, Raúl is about as likeable as Michael Rooker's title character in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and those who failed to find the humor in Henry--it's there--are likely to feel the same way about Tony Manero, its unlikely socio-political South American analogue.

While some critics have described the film as "ugly," both literally and figuratively, there's a cruel beauty to Larraín's assured direction, the Super 16 cinematography (blown up to 35mm), and occasional, disorienting out-of-focus shot, making Tony Manero a fever dream in every sense of the term.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Tony Manero (John Travolta): "Oh fuck the future!"
Fusco (Sam Coppola): "No, Tony! You can't fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't planned for it!"



Tony Manero plays the Northwest Film Forum 8/21-27. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Images from Highlighter (John Travolta), MUBI (Alfredo Castro), and IMDb (Castro).