‘Disco, Ibiza, Locomía’: visual and narrative disaster about two exciting characters from Spanish musical history | Culture

A documentary released by MovistarPlus+ in the first days of summer 2022 revealed to viewers two of the most fascinating characters that Spanish audiovisuals have produced in recent years: Xavier Font, leader of the music band dance Locomía, of great national and international success in the late eighties and early nineties; and José Luis Gil, powerful producer of the Hispavox record company, and star maker. With a very cinematic personality, charisma and image, each in their own style, Font and Gil dazzled with their talk, their resentment and their reasons, each one placing themselves alternately, according to the chapter of the series and the life stage in the one they were encountering around the birth, evolution and death of the Locomía, as victim or executioner, as hero, antihero or villain of enormous complexity and entity, and seductive dramatic possibilities.

Regardless of the excellent work of Jorge Laplace, director of Locomía, the Movistar documentary miniseries, in that story there was also a great fiction film, and not only because of the environment in which the band developed, the Ibiza of the night, sex and drugs, along with the paradox of triumph among the teenage girls from Spain and Latin America in a group of young gay men, but above all because of the overwhelming personality of Font y Gil. Two years later, it comes Disco, Ibiza, Locomía, the fiction dreamed of by those of us who glimpsed such a possibility, co-written and directed by Kike Maíllo. But it’s a disaster.

Maíllo himself says that when Laplace’s documentary was released he had already developed the script for his own work, and that he did not even want to see it. And it’s a shame because you would have realized that the structural and dramatic essence of the television series is too similar to the dramatic scaffolding of your fiction, with one caveat: in the film it doesn’t have the irresistible intensity of voice and gaze, really. and struggle, of bitchy lives built by night and money, of rises and falls, of mutual complicity and destruction, of the real Font and Gil. Jaime Lorente, from a naturalness without enough nerve, and Alberto Ammann, in a reckless role of physical and vocal composition that never quite gels, are the pale reflections of two real men in arms.

The structural formula chosen by Maíllo, starting from a private mediation meeting with all the parties involved in the economic and rights conflict around the group, with which to then put together the puzzle through flashbacks more or less chronological, thematic or character-oriented, it is in line with the documentary pattern of statements with talking heads of the miniseries. In Disco, Ibiza, Locomía few things happen, because almost everything is told, and that is a defect that another of Maíllo’s works already had: the discreet Enemy Cosmetics (2020), based on the novel by Amélie Nothomb.

The worst thing is that this dramatic, narrative and interpretive base is not the only thing that does not work. From the first sequence, the contrast between what the narrator states in off What Ibiza was in those days, with hedonism as a way of life around “the best nightclub in the world”, and what you see in images is devastating. If there was no budget for extras and to shoot good club sequences with the necessary time, the atmosphere would have had to be created, from color, textures or staging, in another way. With no unity of style or genre, wandering between firecracker comedy, homeless musical and personal drama, the film, with ugly pseudo-animations and computer graphics that aim to add shine, has problems even in the sound editing of several shot-reverse shot sequences with foreshortening And not even the music has power. A missed opportunity.

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