Narciso

Set in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1959, at the dawn of what would become South America’s longest dictatorship under Alfredo Stroessner, Narciso opens not as a reconstruction of history but as a mood suspended in uncertainty. Marcelo Martinessi avoids the museum-glass approach to period drama. The year is not underlined in costume or décor so much as felt in atmosphere. The characters do not know what their country will become. The audience does. That gap generates the unease.

Narciso (Diro Romero), returning from Buenos Aires with rock and roll records tucked under his arm, joins and upends a local radio station that trades in Dracula radio plays and folkloric performance. He quickly becomes its electric centre, a rock and roll whisperer. Desired by men and women alike, he captivates without fully revealing himself. Martinessi resists psychologising him. Narciso functions less as a character to be decoded than as a surface upon which others project longing, envy, fear. Described by the director as an “elusive homme fatal”, Narciso is a body that absorbs and reflects the anxieties of a society negotiating repression and desire as if they were the same substance. Diro Romero understands this assignment. His performance is all charge and withholding. He is magnetic precisely because he remains slightly out of reach.

Around him, the radio station becomes a battleground. The broadcasts, drawn directly from period press, include moral denunciations and public outings of queer men. What begins as cultural friction over imported rock records slowly reveals itself as something meaner. The language of “decency” hardens. Fear organises itself into policy. Martinessi is careful not to reduce repression to a single villain. In interviews he notes that entire societies participate in producing authoritarian mechanisms. The narrative follows that logic. Moral panic is not imposed from above alone; it is echoed, amplified, enjoyed.

If the radio concentrates sound and ideology, the American presence operates more quietly. Ian Wesson (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), an embassy official, lends his record collection. Running water arrives in Paraguay in 1959 through a US-promoted project, a detail the film incorporates through the image of a water plant that still functions today. Infrastructure promises progress. It also introduces dependence. The water flows, unquestioned. Authority embeds itself in pipes and habits rather than speeches. Martinessi does not overstate this subtheme. Its restraint is what makes it linger.

The tension between rock and roll and Paraguayan folklore is not framed as simple liberation versus backwardness. Tradition offers belonging and memory; it can also police borders. Modernity arrives as rhythm and possibility, but also as suspicion and foreign imprint. The soundtrack, from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly, pulses with vitality, yet every dance feels shadowed by surveillance.

What makes Narciso striking is the way it acquires a contemporary charge without insisting on it. The narrative never winks at the present, never draws explicit parallels. And yet its portrait of media-fueled moral panic, of bodies turned into public evidence, of desire recoded as threat, resonates with unsettling clarity. The film does not reach toward our moment; our moment seems to lean into it.

Martinessi, whose earlier The Heiresses examined inherited patterns of repression, again suggests that destructive habits pass from one generation to the next like a quiet illness. The interiors of the radio station – controlled, enclosed, heavy with curtains and microphones – mirror that containment. The city itself appears only in fragments, ghostly and incomplete, as if public space has already begun to shrink.

If there is a limitation, it lies in the deliberate elusiveness of its central figure. Some viewers may wish for greater emotional penetration into Narciso’s interior life. But that absence is coherent with the design. He is less biography than catalyst, less confession than rhythm, despite being based on Bernardo Aranda, a Paraguayan radio personality.

By the time silence falls, the tragedy feels less personal than structural. Freedom, here, is intoxicating but fragile. It can electrify a room. It can also provoke a system that knows how to tighten its grip.

Narciso excels not through spectacle or easy catharsis, but through precision: in how it understands that repression does not arrive with a drumroll. It seeps, it broadcasts, it pipes itself quietly into daily life – until what once sounded like music becomes evidence.

Reviewed on: 01 Mar 2026