Narciso: Taste as a Method of Control
Colombian film critic Juan Carlos Lemus Polania writes about the Panorama section FIPRESCI prize winner from the 2026 Berlinale. Marcelo Martinessi’s Narciso explores the politics of listening, as this story of late-1950s Paraguay turns on the clash between traditional music and rock ‘n’ roll at an Asuncion radio station, where the larger stakes are no less than who is heard and who is silenced.
In Narciso, musical taste is not presented as an innocent preference. It functions as a mechanism of power, distributing rights to desire, to belong, and to be heard. In Paraguay in the 1950s, the struggle over “what should be played” does not merely shape private longing. It becomes a key instrument of political and social discipline, continuously redrawing the scope of what a community deems acceptable.
The film opens on a murder already committed, and rather than constructing a classical investigation, Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi rewinds to reconstruct the atmosphere that made that death possible. Into late-’50s Asuncion arrives Narciso (Diro Romero), newly returned from Argentina, determined to make his way as a radio host, rock ‘n’ roll held under his arm. ZP10 Radio Capital—”the voice of the people, for the people”—is run by Luis “Lulu” Bermudez (Manuel Cuenca), a model citizen by self-definition and a censor by vocation, with Goya (Margarita Irun), presenter and on-air crowd-rouser, as the most zealous squire of “what’s ours.” The station forms an ecosystem of corridors, dressing rooms, offices, and stairwells where attraction circulates cautiously. Those narrow spaces are also filled by Ian Wesson (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a U.S. embassy official, and by Narciso’s landlady, Nenucha (Mona Martinez), among other figures drawn into the protagonist’s orbit.
Lulu dismisses rock as an affront to “real” music—native Paraguayan music—yet his rigidity softens when Narciso’s body seduces him. Rock ‘n’ roll does not “win.” What Martinessi lays bare is an operation that mobilizes tradition in public as doctrine while bargaining with it in private whenever it suits. That transaction exposes the utilitarian nature of the supposed purity of “what’s ours,” because it serves to order, classify, and censor, and also to conceal the censor’s own desire. For Martinessi, then, rock ‘n’ roll is not simply a subversive rhythm but a bodily event. The young people clamoring for Elvis or Bill Haley are the symptom. They ask for a beat, not permission. When Narciso sings “Peggy Sue” before the ZP10 audience, it is more than pantomime. There is electricity in the air. Expectation becomes met gazes, then footwork, then frenetic dancing. Desire turns public. Suddenly, the “people” in the station’s slogan ceases to be a moral abstraction. Rock arrives as a leak, a sign of air, and the authoritarian order reads it as danger because of what it does to desire. By contrast, Paraguayan music—”the best” and “ours,” according to Lulu and his entourage—stops being an innocent inheritance and becomes an instrument of legitimacy.
That friction intensifies with Wesson’s arrival and grows palpable in a speech about an aqueduct to be built. The diplomat brings not only eccentric manners and unfamiliar tastes. He brings a comparative scale. His modernization is material—water, infrastructure—but his language imports hierarchy. A remark about “catching up” to other capitals turns the present into backwardness and the future into obligation. Yet who gets to define what counts as backwardness, or what direction that future should take? Is such a comparison an external imposition or a shared aspiration? Narciso does not ask the viewer to choose between inside and outside. It shows how the opposition functions as a prestige code. Within that code, the foreign operates as an implicit norm, while the local reacts as an essence under threat. Hence the scandal when a Paraguayan diva sings rock ‘n’ roll. This is not musical gossip but symbolic conflict. When an authorized figure crosses registers, hybridity blurs the cultural border, and a regime that depends on borders tries to restore them the moment they become porous.
Within those porosities lies desire itself, or rather the question of what one is permitted – or entitled – to desire. Here sexuality does not simply accompany the story. It precipitates it. Sexual desire is not treated as a subplot or ornament. It operates as a narrative motor, reorganizing power relations and forcing key decisions precisely where control is exercised through the policing of bodies and intimacy. Martinessi stages this in scenes where attraction and surveillance fold into one another. Lulu’s gaze as Narciso dances, for instance, concentrates desire and jealousy at once, suggesting that under authoritarian conditions the intimate can become public evidence, that is, suspicion. Even the most private gestures are saturated with an atmosphere of predation. Likewise, Lulu’s nocturnal drift maps repression and unsettles alliances, while the night becomes the territory where what is forbidden negotiates its right to exist.
The film’s use of space is one of its most consistent techniques. Martinessi prefers enclosed interiors—corridors, dressing rooms, offices, stairwells—transitional areas where friction and surveillance are unavoidable, both visible and sensed. The camera often observes from behind or in between, capturing moments when characters interact unseen or are discovered at inopportune times. The nighttime scene at the water plant, where men fight amid the machinery of modernization, is especially revealing. In the dim light, physical contact occurs only in covert ways, with aggression masking repressed desire. These encounters become socially acceptable under the guise of play or bravery, allowing closeness without direct acknowledgement or immediate suspicion. The physical closeness in darkness conveys more than any explanation of a political “long night.”
The radio adaptation of Dracula brings an allegory that, when it detaches from the scene, flirts with underlining. The vampire, as a figure of power that feeds by absorption—without needing to constantly show itself—fits the film’s logic. Authority fixes itself as climate, becomes routine, and in that very routinization no longer needs justification. The film also leans on the period’s radio-drama performativity, with declaimed voices and radio that functions as a stage. Still, the choral structure reveals fragilities by dispersing the focus. Many characters and forces circulate, but not all achieve the same dramatic density. Narciso himself functions less as a psychologically legible figure than as a catalyst, a voice and a body onto which others project desire, fear, prestige, and fantasies of nation. That opacity is coherent with Martinessi’s project—showing the system more than the case—yet it can cool the experience, since at times the film seems more interested in what Narciso triggers than in what he lives.
A risk in portraying repression with such formal precision is that the film may inadvertently make the atmosphere of control seem appealing. The carefully crafted shadows, alluring corridors, and musical energy can render the climate of control attractive. This seductive quality is ambivalent and may encourage simplistic interpretations—such as modernity versus tradition or desire as the sole cause of conflict—because the film’s world is so convincingly built. Narciso attempts to counter this by revealing hypocrisies and condescension, but it cannot entirely prevent superficial readings.
Narciso does not solve a crime. Instead, it exposes how power infiltrates through small concessions, humiliating comparisons, and selective purism, controlling what can be heard and desired. The radio embodies this irony, as “the voice of the people” determines who is included and who is silenced. This question remains relevant today, as new platforms have replaced old ones, but the monitoring of desire and belonging continues.
Juan Carlos Lemus Polania
© FIPRESCI 2026