“Narciso”, interview with director Marcelo Martinessi

Presented in Panorama at the 76th Berlinale, “Narciso“ is the second feature film by Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi, whose debut “Las Herederas“ won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize in Competition at the Berlinale in 2018. Set in Asunción in 1959, the film follows Narciso, a charismatic young musician who becomes a symbol of freedom at a moment when rock ‘n’ roll has just arrived in Paraguay and when the Stroessner dictatorship is tightening its grip on bodies, desires and voices. Inspired by Guido Rodríguez Alcalá‘s investigation into the real murder of Bernardo Aranda, “Narciso” is a film noir that moves between dance and discipline, between the illusion of modernity and the consolidation of repression.

Welcome back to the Berlinale

Eight years have passed since “Las Herederas” brought Marcelo Martinessi to international attention. In the meantime, he has made theatre, opened a cinema in his hometown in Paraguay, and spent years developing a project far more complex and experimental than his debut. “I ended up exhausted after Las Herederas” he admits, “but I’m now weirdly eager to make a film faster because I’m older, and if I make one film every eight years, I won’t make many.” The wait, however, was worth it. “Narciso” is a film that takes creative risks precisely because the success of the first one allowed him to. “We said: let’s use this trust and this blank check to experiment, to do something we would never have been able to finance if we were starting from scratch.”

The grey between dictator and victims

The genesis of “Narciso” lies in Guido Rodríguez Alcalá‘s novel about a real criminal case that shook Paraguay in the late 1950s, a case in which the Stroessner regime used the murder of a young man as a pretext to persecute not only the LGBTQ+ community but anyone who didn’t align with its values. What drew Marcelo Martinessi to the novel was its refusal of easy binaries. “He doesn’t blame only the dictator, he also blames the society” says the director. “Cinema hardly ever really goes into the social fabric around dictators, into the people that support the regime. It’s always very binary: the dictator and the victims. But there’s a lot of grey in between.” It is in that grey zone that “Narciso” lives.

A film about the present disguised as a period piece

“Narciso” is set in 1959, but Marcelo Martinessi is clear that it speaks directly to the present and to a future he fears. “Authoritarianism comes back with different shapes” he says. Coming from a country like Paraguay, small and vulnerable to the political winds blowing from Washington, he feels the weight of that observation acutely: “We didn’t elect Trump, but we are having a lot of consequences of what happens in America in the South American region.” One line from Guido Rodríguez Alcalá‘s novel struck him as almost uncannily contemporary: a character shouts at Americans “you come here and think you can do whatever you want.” “That is from the 50s” Marcelo Martinessi says, “That is from two months ago.”

Radio, rock ‘n’ roll and Dracula

A central element of the film is radio, the only mass medium in Paraguay in the 1950s, and therefore a contested territory. Nationalist folklore music, the promotion of Paraguayan identity, the most popular soap opera of the time, Dracula, all coexisted on the airwaves, reflecting a country that couldn’t speak openly about what was happening to it. And then came rock ‘n’ roll, foreign and unsettling, carrying with it the contradictions of American influence in Latin America. “America has supported dictatorships in Latin America historically” Marcelo Martinessi reflects, “and at the same time brought rock and roll, which contradicted everything they promoted. There is a tension there that is very interesting to think about.”

The power of cinema

For Marcelo Martinessi, cinema’s power lies precisely in its capacity to hold multiple things at once, history and the present, the particular and the universal, the visible and the hidden. “Narciso” can be read through different characters, followed along different threads. That openness is intentional: “Cinema has the possibility of touching a bit of everything” he says, “in order to understand what could have happened and what could happen in the future.”

Plot