The bad news of the week is that Tom Cruise and John Travolta are contemplating exposing themselves to ridicule by appearing in a remake of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The good news is that Travolta's appearance in Saturday Night Fever, the movie that made his name over 30 years ago, has inspired this extraordinary political thriller set in 1978 in Pinochet's totalitarian Chile. Alfredo Castro, who looks like a seedy version of Al Pacino, plays Raúl, a ratty 55-year-old layabout performing with a troupe of dancers in a run-down cabaret and bar in one of Santiago's less salubrious suburbs. He's obsessed with Saturday Night Fever and more especially with Tony Manero, the white-suited disco star played by Travolta. He knows the character's lines by heart, though he actually speaks little English, and can mimic his every move on the dance floor. His aim is to escape from his surroundings, if only briefly, by appearing on the "One O'Clock Festival Show", a national TV programme featuring lookalikes, competing with half-a-dozen other Tony Maneros.
In addition to being an impotent, uneducated, untalented, exploitative loser, Raúl is also a psychopathic murderer. Casually and remorselessly he kills anyone who annoys him or gets in his way, whether they be an old lady with a few shillings in her purse or a security guard at the builders' yard where Raúl steals glass bricks to build a disco-dancing stage in his bedroom. While he goes about his lethal business undisturbed, secret policemen are investigating his colleagues at the club who are distributing anti-Pinochet flyers. This is a country where asking for a little democracy is worse than committing murder, where the highest kind of ambition is appearing on a TV show that insists on "no dirty jokes, no politics, no swearing" impersonating a flashy American dancer, who is himself strutting his stuff to get out of his dead-end world. This harsh, grainy movie is a perfect image of Pinochet's Chile and has a memorable performance by Castro.