Impersonation is certainly an odd profession. It isn't quite acting but something more superficial. It is the active pursuit to be someone else, to mimic another human being rather than to give skin and blood to a fictional character, perhaps to escape themselves. It is a sad profession. I haven't know many in the business but I have encountered one. A gentleman who regularly attends my cinema, often to take in double features, say 'Genova' and 'The 400 Blows', impersonates Elvis 'The King' Pressley, he swaggers slowly around the cinema foyer in his white leather shoes and once, when I was cleaning the popcorn from the ground of the cinema and he was the last patron to leave, he sang to me, perhaps in a moment of joy and or perhaps in a moment of self promotion. He left a photo of himself dressed as Elvis that is now taped to our popcorn machine. Any aspiring innocence evident in his character has been marred by a rumour of the gentleman being banned at one of our sister cinemas after being caught gratifying himself during a film.
If the story I just told you confirms the tragic and self-loathing nature of impersonation, the new Chilean film Tony Manero reaffirms such and goes further than I ever could with the Elvis story. 'Tony Manero' tells the story of Raúl, so captured by the story of 'Saturday Night Fever', he goes on a quest to recreate John Travolta's character in himself by putting on the film's dance performances at a small venue and on national television, all set against the backdrop of . Raúl won't let anything get in his way to getting what he wants and resorts to murdering anyone that does.
Raul is constructed as a tragic character, his dance moves are embarrassing and regularly makes mistakes, including a brief fall on his big night.Not only that his behaviour can quite often be infantile, cowardly and selfish. The film must be noted for creating one of the least sympathetic characters in the history of cinema, without one redeeming quality.
This may very well owe to the filmmaker's anger over social complicity under the the Pinochet regime that acts as a background to the narrative. Raul uses a violent and psychotic poltical and social climate to get away with his acts, no one seems to notice and no one challenges him. There are characters that are shown to be rebelling against the dictatorship but they are eventually dealt with, the film suggests that Raul's detached behaviour, and the escape into the fantasy of impersonation, is a way that it was possible to survive.
The camera is repeatedly out of focus and much of the footage is graining, an asethetic quality that reflects both the out of focus morals of the time period and the Raul's out of focus grasp on reality, and it works.
For one of the most thought provoking films of the year, an exploration of disconnection of reality and a common escape into fantasy, Tony Manero is a must see.
