Wri/Dir: Marcelo Martinessi | with Diro Romero, Manuel Cuenca, Mona Martinez, Nahuel Perez Biscayart | Paraguay / Germany / Uruguay / Brazil / Portugal / Spain / France 2026
Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi follows his Berlin winner Las Herederes with a sultry dread-soaked musical murder mystery about a charismatic singer with bisexual appeal.
Set during President Alfredo Stroessner’s suffocating military regime of the 1958s, (where his ‘Colorado’ Party was the only one legally permitted), the film opens in 1959 as Narciso is just back from Buenos Aires with rock ’n’ roll in his veins and a lively list of new songs to puncture the oppressive inertia of the creative scene in Asuncion.
Narciso (a sinuous Diro Romero) is nightclub entertainer and music sensation and a symbol of freedom against the repressive backdrop of strikes and demands for political amnesty that shaped the era. A tousled-haired silky-skinned adonis he charms the birds from the trees, and not only the female variety, and he flirts freely with both.
The locals are entranced by this enigmatic free spirit and freely worship at his feet, but others from the nation’s Catholic bastion regard the controversial personality and his music as vulgar and subversive. Mr ‘Lulu’ a local impresario at Radio Capital, hires Narciso despite his avant-garde act that includes his American stooge and sidekick (Nahuel Perez Biscayart). Meanwhile the troupe are mounting a broadcast production of ‘Dracula’, that echoes Stroessner’s grip on the nation.
Martinessi makes evocative use of the narrative ploy that feature a subversive character entering the scene disrupting the status quo (eg Passolini’s Theorum), and it seems the locals are only too ready to accept this catalyst for change. But not all of them.
Fearing a backlash ‘Lulu’ asks Narciso to tone down his style and musical delivery feeling the vibe is too louche, and peppered with US words that locals cannot understand. An ageing broadcaster at Radio Capital denounces Narciso, over the airwaves, as a negative force that gives Paraguay’s macho image a bad name. Narciso remains undeterred and consults his regular seamstress, an older woman who also fancies her chances with the young charmer. And this heady brew of attraction and repulsion drives the feature forward with its stunning visual allure.
Rather like Las Herederas Martinessi’s second full feature takes place almost entirely in dimly lit domestic interiors and scuzzy confines of the club where defamatory graffiti has been scrawled on the wall signalling that someone clearly bears Narciso a grudge, and this not going to end well as we later discover in this intriguing and atmospheric sociopolitical thriller.
BERLINALE | PANORAMA STRAND | TUESDAY 17 FEBRUARY 8PM