chaos-rampant
It was a fortuitous accident that film evolved into a narrative medium. It could have gone down different paths. It started in the hands of its engineers as simple novelty, quickly abandoned - it seemed there was nothing left to discover. Men from the theater saw it as an opportunity to construct a stage and dazzle with effects. People wanted to be told stories though, deep stories about life, and there was money to be made, so that's where it swung to. We lucked out because erudite minds who wanted to work in the new canvas had to puzzle about how it all amounted to a sort of life, create their paintings or music or philosophy in the midst of life. Film as a language would have been tremendously impoverished without this limitation, which is the same one we encounter in life: there is painting or dance only for someone whose senses they strike with curiosity or desire, who has a past and future life that they enliven, in other words a narrative.So we have here a triumph of this language in its struggle to deliver a richer life than usual.It is about dance, wonderful tango. But it can't be just filmed dance, dance itself is more than bodies to music. It is about desire, age, creativity, passion, loss, meaning; all the great dilemmas of life. But they have to be uncovered as life so there needs to be a narrative framework. We want in both cases to find human subjectivity in the dancefloor of its taking shape.The story around these things is about a director who puzzles about a new show and passion in his life. It starts with him on his desk narrating the film we see. It's followed by a hallucination of a male and female pair dancing in a dark soundstage, an old flame we have just seen walk out of his life and her new man. We have some obvious parallels of course: his eye as the camera, his face superimposed on narrative walls. So the point is that when we return to the soundstage the space is already charged with dimensions of memory and mind, internal space where the urges first come to life.The space itself is marvelous and provides endless opportunities to create mind: blank or colored walls, slides and movie clips, painted skies where figures of history emerge from, endless rows of mirrors. We have of course the filmmaker as the protagonist ruminating on lost friends, cruel politics, senseless war and duty to memory. It's his show after all, the broader film, his space of expression. What's so marvelous though is the conflation of inner life into dance. Desire as seeing and settling on her face among many. Couples dancing. Choreographed order. Piercing gazes locked together in tango. A tension that is both affected and yet real just then. Something inscrutable in the air that can only maybe danced out and never quite figured out more. Dance as looking for union.All through the film we see the show take shape, the slow process. In one particularly evocative scene he blows air into empty dresses and this comes alive as inspiration, and this is followed by her stepping out from behind canvas screens to meet him. Soon there's danger that is foreshadowed for the end, an old boyfriend with possibly mob ties who is also funding the show, his heartbreak and loss mirroring the narrator's.So the violence bubbling in the narrator has been merely postponed, what's the resolution?It ends with the lovers' duel sublimated on the stage between dancers, this was a pivotal scene in one of Saura's previous dance films (flamengo there). The whole scene is a masterstroke. The key players looking, immersed, affected. An implicit tension that may be just the show. The dance ending with a knife's flash. The scorned man gets up and yells as if having her stabbed was a thought or an urge that he regretted only too late. (Saura could have made it more clear that the dancer who stabs her was also one of the funder's men, earlier he is seen escorting the girl to a car that has come to pick her up). At this point it may seem like a trivial setup: reality shown to be fiction.But the point is, as all of them walk out of the stage together, reconciled, enthusiastic, casually exchanging words, that all this emotional drama and hurt that was foreshadowed is seen with more distance to be a trivial fiction, an appearance on a stage, an illusion. Wonderful Spanish sensibility.The last shot in context is one of the greatest I've seen, a Marienbad tracking shot through empty space towards glass, tentative reflection that engulfs our vision. Storraro excels all through the film, but here he surpasses himself. It's seen here as clearly as anywhere else that the film is in the company of Resnais, not Bob Fosse.Something to meditate upon.
laurel14
Tango may well be the greatest dance movie ever made. Its stunning dance sequences, relentless tango music (orchestrated by Lalo Schiffrin)and throbbing sexuality place this film in a class by itself. There simply has never been anything like it. And, if you have any male hormones left and do not fall immediately head over heels in love with Mia Maestro than something is definitely wrong with you. She is what Audrey Hepburn might have been had Miss Hepburn been Latin and had a spectacular dancer's figure. But the entire cast is wonderful and the lighting and color are explosive. Go see it, then take the next plane to Buenos Aires. I did.
finki
This big failure is one of the worst and arrogant movies ever produced. People should realize that in Argentina the film was repudiated by both the audience and the public.Tango produced much, much better movies.Carlos Saura, Lalo Schiffrin and Vittorio Storaro made good films... but this is their worst. A superficial look at an Argentinean phenomenon. The whole story... there is no story: it is a superficial view of the Buenos Aires music produced by executives with a complete ignorance of the issue.Frankly, this film should be shelved and never exhibited again.
michalis damianou
If you like dancing in general,this film is for you. Carlos Saura tries to present the art of filming with all the necessary procedure in a tango atmosphere. Argentinian nostalgia in a plot where Mario,the director(after being left by Laura)will fall in love with the first in-line ballerina,Elena who is pursued by a rich gangster. The rest of the movie is a set of lessons on tango with all the fast changes in pace,watching the feet in a complicated backup of the relevant music.Symbolism takes precedence in this movie by the insertion of inanimate objects like the camera or the rehearsal chairs.A hymn to cinema,dance and their relation to life.
