Tango,
the recent Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from Argentina, may
not be as autobiographical as other works of this nature, but it comes
close. Carlos Saura, the Spanish director of such musically inclined
pictures as Carmen, Blood Wedding and Flamenco, was
approached to make a movie about tango, visited tango bars for research,
and then, without a script, set about making a movie about a director who
attempts to make a tango movie without -- you guessed it -- a script.
Stunt filmmaking? Perhaps. But darned if this thing doesn't work.
The plot of Tango is so makeshift that it's obvious -- even to
those who don't know the aforementioned genesis of the production -- that
it was never meant to be the backbone of the picture. Noted Argentine
actor Miguel Angel Sola plays Mario Suarez, the weary director of the
film-within-the-film. Coping with a mid-life crisis and still aching from
his divorce from a successful dancer (Cecilia Narova), Mario throws
himself into his new production, using shards of memories from his own
experiences to shape his movie (i.e., his life literally becomes his art).
While researching the film, he meets one of its financial backers, a local
gangster (Juan Luis Galiardo) who asks the director to consider giving a
part to his beautiful young mistress, Elena (Mia Maestro). To Mario's
surprise, Elena turns out be a strong (if unpolished) dancer; between her
raw talent and his own infatuation with this gamine, he ends up handing
her the lead role. Before long, she falls in love with Mario, eventually
leaving the mob bigwig and shacking up with the director -- a decision
that could prove to be as inflammatory as the emotions depicted in the
vibrant dances that make up Mario's movie.
The tango is such a sexy, fiery, passionate dance, it's amusing to note
that the representative dances on view in this film aren't especially
burning with the requisite carnal savagery -- I've seen dozens of
Hollywood musicals that emit more rhythmic heat than this flick. Yet while
the lack of dance fever may lead some to question the whole point of the
movie, I think this laidback approach was exactly what Saura had in mind.
Taking the artistic rather than the emotional approach, Saura has broken
down the dance in an almost dreamlike manner that lets us analyze the
effort that goes into each step, each swing, each swivel of the hips. It's
a risky gamble, but one that pays off handsomely, both for the dancers
(who earn our renewed admiration) and for the audience (who'll be
transfixed by the amazing grace of the performers).
Still, the true star of Tango isn't Saura or even his dancers;
instead, it's Vittorio Storaro, the brilliant cinematographer who copped
Oscars for Apocalypse Now, Reds and The Last Emperor. Aided
by art director Emilio Basaldua's sparse creations (lots of mirrors and
white backdrops), Storaro creates a succession of stunning images through
his extraordinary use of light, shadows, and various color schemes. One
hypnotic sequence, a staged retelling of the country's bloody past, finds
his camera weaving through the dark passages of a stark set expansive
enough to incorporate a torture room and an open grave full of murdered
civilians; another finds two groups of men facing off on a stage that's
painted half-white, half-black, with the two leaders going mano a
mano (in more ways than one) in an intimate dance.
Yet despite the grandiosity of these sequences, my favorite images were
the simpler ones that Storaro captured, such as Elena's silhouette looming
large behind a white curtain, or her slinky moves on a bluish stage, bare
except for the two seated men providing musical accompaniment.
Tango shows that, in dance as in life, the smallest gestures can
reverberate as forcefully as the larger ones.
From
www.cln.com
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