Cannes. Tony Manero.

"Nothing I've seen in Cannes has possessed and disturbed me quite as much as the Directors' Fortnight entry Tony Manero, from young Chilean director Pablo Larraín," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

"If Larraín has an argument to make about the power of pop culture, it definitely isn't a positive one.... There's a current of reckless, nihilistic black humor in Tony Manero, which might just make it a candidate for international cult status. But only if you're the sort of person who understands that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is pretty funny too."

"Chile's darkest days coincide with the golden age of disco in Tony Manero, a disturbing character study with a trenchant edge of social satire," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "Larrain follows his 2006 debut Fuga with a film that works on at least three levels: notably, as the study of a warped loner, as a comment on fan fetishism, and as a portrait of Chile's national traumas under the Pinochet dictatorship."

The film, "despite its various forms of crudeness, is vital and strangely arresting," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "It's 1978, and Raul Peralta is a fiftysomething loser and petty criminal who is obsessed with John Travolta and his performance as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever.... The problem is that he becomes so intent on winning a John Travolta look-alike contest on television that he starts killing people who get in his way. And not very prettily either."

Update, 6/6: "The film turns the premise of a rom-com into a quiet cold-blooded serial-killer thriller with only slight political undertones," writes HarryTuttle in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Pablo Larraín says he had to hasten the post-production of his film in order to deliver the reels to Olivier Père for Cannes. I wonder how much of this could explain certain awkward cuts, and the intentional discontinuity between takes within a unique scene. Though Larraín seems to experiment with out-of-focus shots too (an intention more justifiable than the jump cuts in my mind), so it might all be part of an (arguable) anti-conformist stance."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 3:31 PM