Tango

We love Carlos Saura for his flamenco trilogy, Carmen, Blood Wedding, and El Amor Brujo. Would we feel the same way about Tango?

The flamenco movies are dark dramas told mostly through dance. The dance style is passionate and soulful - the focus is on intensity and concentration rather than technique. In flamenco, this is called duende. The stories are about love, betrayal, and also about themselves. Carmen, for example, is about a rehearsal for a production of Carmen. The line between story and meta-story are deliberately blurred.

The characters often include an older man, wise but wounded, and troubled in love. He may be in love with a dancer, not quite young, perhaps a little unusual looking (jolie-laide) but a fiery intense dancer. She rejects him, so he turns to a younger, beautiful but less experienced dancer. There may be violence, as well.

This pretty much sums up Tango. It starts with a producer writing a script describing the scene we are watching. It turns out that he is producing a tango performance, and we see him watching rehearsals, tryouts, children's tango classes, and imaginary visions. His principal dancer is his ex-girlfriend. But he is falling in love with a younger Audrey-Hepburnesque beauty, the girlfriend of a mobster backing the show. So that's the story, but it's not the movie.

First, the movie is self-reflexive, like Fellini's 8 1/2. To drive this home, we frequently see the camera reflected in the mirrored set. One shot shows a closeup of the producer's eye cross-fading into the camera. OK, not subtle. But it is cute - the producer talks about the themes of the show (movement from outer light to inner darkness, for ex), and the movie then does what it said it would.

But what about the tango? The rest is just on the margins: the movie is really about music and dance. The dance sequences are amazing, the dancers eyes drilling into each others souls, their feet weaving in and out, bodies held just so. There are traditional tangos, and more unusual numbers, between two men (but with the traditional male-female partner roles), two women, a man and two women (the producer's two lovers), children, etc. The music is also a mixture of traditional and nuevo. The instrumentation is traditional, bandoneon, violin, guitar, piano, etc. the rhythms tense and skittish. One number is only percussion - tom-toms and guiro. I am a tango neophyte, but some of the music seems to owe a lot to Astor Piazzolla, who shook up the tango world in the 50's with his avant-garde tango nuevo.

Special recognition: The music is directed and conducted by Lalo Schiffren (Mission Impossible theme), a native of B.A., Argentina. He is a wonder, as are the musicians he has working with him.