Tony Manero (2008)

pirelli

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1223975/

Awards:6 wins & 1 nomination

This parts of a description from IMDB , Read the rest by clicking the link above.

The protagonist of this film from Chile set in 1978 Santiago at the height of Augusto Pinochet's reign of terror is a murderer and petty thief whose only goal in life is to dance like John Travolta's character Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. It's already a year later, but Fever's still playing and Raul (Alfredo Castro) goes to watch in an empty theater, repeating Travolta's lines with a heave accent and mimicking his arm gestures when he dances. Raul is the lead dancer, if it makes any sense to say that, in a shabby cantina where an older woman, a younger woman, his middle-aged girlfriend, and a youth all seem to adore him even though he is tired and fifty-two and can't get an erection any more. Outside it's a quietly terrifying world where soldiers patrol the streets in open trucks with rifles raised and plainclothes agents stop people at random and you can get shot for being out of place or having political fliers.

Raul's behavior is a metaphor for the morally bankrupt-from-the-start Pinochet regime and the film does an excellent job of conveying the absolute sleaziness of absolutely everything--a terrible world pushed into existence by the CIA and perhaps now dominated by slick new US products like the Travolta picture. Just as Raul will kill to get his pseudo-disco floor effect (which is totally shoddy), the others on his little neighborhood dance team will betray each other to stay in good with the despicable regime. Raul walks away from his heinous crimes with no fear of capture; the regime is busy perpetrating its own crimes and its own terror.

It feels like the movie will stoop to anything, but then, so would a dictator. The raw, hand-held camera work helps maintain the down-and-dirty intensity, as does faded, dingy-looking color. As Leslie Felprin notes in the Variety review, the camera follows around Raul as doggedly as the Dardennes have done in some of their films, but without any of the humanism or positive endings the Dardennes would provide. The action has a picaresque quality that makes it seem plausible: you just watch in mild horror to see what happens next. To top it all off, Alfredo Castro, in the brave and haunting lead performance, looks a lot like Al Pacino--a Pacino who hasn't been prettied up and will never see a fat paycheck.

The actor Alferdo Castro looks like Al Pacino and acts very well also. The film is great if you like saturday night fever or dancing on the weekends as that seems to be his only passion. There some truly grotesque relationships in this film which are mainly because of the awful demon that has entwined itself into an almost family. If you watch please leave an opinion here.

Duggy747

I have actually had this film for the past 2 years but have never gotten around to watching it. It wasn't until FilmFour advertised there recently that I remembered I had it.

Might give it a shout tonight, actually!