“The film is visually gorgeous, and this beauty serves a narrative and dramatic purpose – to have us fully immersed in the times, to live them as if they were the present.”

Eight years after his first feature film The Heiresses won two awards in the Berlinale main competition, Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi returns with a movie no longer set in contemporary times, but going back to the end of the fifties (1958, to be precise). It was a time when both Paraguay and the world outside this country changed rapidly and profoundly – but in opposite directions. A few years earlier Paraguay had fallen under a military dictatorship, which was tightening its grip more and more over its people; meanwhile, the rest of the world was beginning to be swept away by American rock and roll. The collision between those two courses of societal transformation is at the core of the narrative in Narciso. After getting a job at a radio station, the eponymous character (played by Diro Romero) manages to overcome the manager’s reluctance to put on some rock songs, as they are what the young audience craves, and he will become an idol to them, kind of a rock star himself for allowing them to listen and dance to the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley and His Comets.

Through his use of a flashback structure, Martinessi makes it no secret that this story will not end well for the winds of change embodied by Narciso. For he, like rock and roll, represents everything the totalitarian regime in charge loathes and fears: the openly exuberant expression of desire and pleasure, of appetite and energy for life and change. Such appetites and desires can never be suppressed, and what the powers that be aim for is to keep them shameful, confined to secrecy, and ultimately usable against the people who have them, as a way to coerce or destroy them. The film takes the opposite position, using every opportunity to advocate for the emancipation of oneself, both in body and mind, and to show how beautiful and rewarding it can feel. The connection with Sense8 formed by this attitude manifests itself more overtly in one particular scene, in which the actors of the radio theatre company are aghast at the discovery of homophobic graffiti on the radio station’s wall.

Another explicit artistic reference by Narciso is that the text performed by the company comes from Dracula, which was notoriously the first one played on the air by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. Similar to what he does for the rock and roll tunes, Martinessi dedicates lengthy sections of his film to the play, its acting and directing – that is to say, the making of art, and its effect on the audiences who witness it and are moved by it. This flow of inspiration and feeling finds an echo in an event serving as a minor narrative arc in the story: how, at the same time, the Paraguayan government finally brings drinkable tap water to its population. Seeing how late they were in providing this fundamental human need, one can ponder how long it would take them to give in to the demand of this higher type of fulfillment, emotional and spiritual, through art and love.

Repression is their only answer, and its veil can only be torn apart – temporarily – when an outsider comes in and disrupts the status quo. In Narciso, it is an American official (portrayed by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) who becomes the link between Narciso’s sex appeal and the radio manager’s bottled-up lust for him. Jealous of how the former two bond over music, the latter agrees to take a progressive stance by allowing his station to be a truthful reflection of its audience. This impulsive choice, born out of sentimental desperation, will eventually lead to tragedy for everyone involved. Martinessi keeps the unfolding of his story simple, and choosing to do so gives space in the film for other things: a large array of political and artistic echoes, as shown before, but also a brilliant depiction of the period Narciso is set in. The film is visually gorgeous, and this beauty serves a narrative and dramatic purpose – to have us fully immersed in the times, to live them as if they were the present. Thus, we are not merely watching a period-piece drama; we are experiencing from the heart, directly, its timeless emotional (on an individual level) and political (once you start thinking globally) urges and hardships, complexities and truths.

(c) Image copyright – La Babosa Cine