When rock'n'roll and the radio were 'queer'

Any film about rock, at least the ones worth watching, is not about rock. Furthermore, now that this musical style has for years been material only attractive to cultural archaeologists, films that talk about it no longer even need it as an excuse or narrative trigger. Rock is just the background music that accompanies tales from the past that challenge historical contents from a social or political angle.

Narcissus, then, is not a film about a famous announcer on Paraguay's public radio who began playing rock'n'roll in 1958 (Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, or Bill Haley and his Comets). In fact, it is not even explicitly a film about the brutal friction between the progress that this music symbolized for the youth of Asunción and the rollback in freedoms that Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship was implementing.

This is a film about the magnetism that deviation and otherness can exert on certain people (and it does not matter if they are young, although in the prime of life this divergence can magnetize you more strongly). Semiclandestine activities or those that worry law-abiding citizens, furtive night meetings, sexual identities driven by curiosity and desire, harmless but symbolic acts of disobedience, attraction to what arrives from abroad... This whole subcultural underworld, in Paraguay in the late 50s, sounded like rock, but it represented many other conflicts that were not precisely musical.