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Tango

Tango (1998)

December. 12,1998
|
7
|
PG-13
| Drama Romance

A dangerous love affair inspires a director to create the most spectacular and boldly seductive dance film ever made. 1998 Oscar Nominee Best Foreign Language Film.

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Reviews

Moustroll
1998/12/12

Good movie but grossly overrated

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Casey Duggan
1998/12/13

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

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Kien Navarro
1998/12/14

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

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Ginger
1998/12/15

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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sugarmack
1998/12/16

Carlos Saura is a genius, and Tango is a paragon of his artistic vision and cleverness. The staging (all in a studio) is wildly imaginative, with dazzling and stirring number after number. I didn't really care whether there was a storyline given how powerful the dancing was, particularly any time the character, Laura, was on screen. However, there is a very clever set of story lines woven together in an almost mischievous way, or as the young folk today would say, 'very meta'. In case the stories of Mario, his show and Argentina since the turn of the 20th Century weren't enough, the mirrored sets add an extra level of irony. The lighting and music are almost characters in themselves in this film, which is not to diminish the strong, subtle acting. I absolutely love this film, which left my mind blown as the final credits rolled.

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vitis3
1998/12/17

A little way into Saura's Tango, the main character, Mario, meets Mia Maestro. We are given the impression, or rather we are told, that Mario must be careful as her lover is a dangerous gangster. This is an attempt to create a dramatic counterpoint to Saura's exploration of different aspects of the tango myth - passion, violence, nostalgia and the mirror of the Argentine national psyche. Sadly the drama succumbs to these other intentions and the movie stumbles more or less confusingly from dance to dance. Characters hover uncomfortably between real humanity and symbolism and fail in both respects. As a consequence, the big themes are merely referred to rather than explored - and the gangster's threat fizzles. This leaves us with the music and (some of) the dancing. We are given a fair sample of tango music. Some of the best is non-dance tango music; highlights are Adriana Varela singing 'Quien hubiera dicho', Horacio Salgan playing 'A Fuego Lento' and tantalising snippets of Gardel singing 'Arrabal Amargo' and Tita Merello singing 'Se dice de mi'. There are also some fine stage tango pieces; such as the ensemble piece with the male dancers. However for me, the most compelling moment is when Carlos Nebbia (Juan Carlos Copes - why did they bother with the alias?) selects an anonymous young woman from the crowd at Confiteria Ideal and they dance to Pugliese's 'Recuerdo'. (In fact, the centrality of Copes to the movie reveals what this movie really is; an attempt to turn a Copes stage show into a movie. I suspect that this movie might have been more successful if they had stuck to that more modest intention.) However I must confess that my criticisms do lay me open to a charge of gross ingratitude. Four years ago, I knew nothing of the tango beyond the dumbest clichés. I had never heard of Pugliese or Copes or Pugliese or Gardel. Then one Sunday evening in March 2004, my wife and I watched this movie. Inspired, primarily by that 'Recuerdo', we took our first tango lesson three days later. There have been some days since when we haven't danced a tango but there cannot have been many when we didn't listen to tango music. Or read about tango. Or watched tango DVDs or YouTube clips.In sum, although I have seen many, many better movies than Carlos Saura's 'Tango', I cannot think of any other movie that has had so much impact on my life.

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Robert J. Maxwell
1998/12/18

There's a scene in "Some Like it Hot" in which Jack Lemmon dances a tango with Joe E. Brown. The tune is a famous one, La Cumparasita or something like that, turned into an American pop song in the 1950s with English lyrics and named "Strange Sensations." Anyway, the dance is played for laughs. Well, it's understandable. The conventions of the tango seem so automated to someone used to other forms. But what surprised me here was the flexibility of the form, the way it is adapted to circumstances. There is, of course, a number here in which two or three dancers express intense passion, the emotion we usually associate with the tango. But there is also a number that is informed by humor. Suarez, who is about to direct a show featuring the tango, native to Argentina, is alone in his studio, talking to himself about the folly of falling in love, and he imagines a scene in which the silhouettes of two dancers perform a comic number, waggling their bottoms at the camera, the music bumping along in the background featuring a few strings and a flatulating tuba, itself an amusing instrument in sound and appearance. Thank you for that tuba, Lalo Schifrin. As an Hispanic himself, Schifrin knows what he's doing. (He makes good use of the bandoneon, a kind of concertina, too.) There is a less-successful number that uses boots and military uniforms in an evocation of the period in the 1970s and 1980s when citizens of Argentina were "disappeared." There are tango-tinged encounters between men and others involving women, that are homosexual in effect. And sometimes there is no music behind the dances at all -- only the natural sounds of clothing rustling and soles squeaking on the wooden floor as the performers twist and turn. Let me get back to that homosexual dance between the two women. One of them, if I got it right, is Suarez's ex wife, a superb dancer played by Cecilia Narova. The younger one is played by Mia Maestro. The dance ends with a sensuous kiss, and I can understand why another woman might want to kiss Maestro. I could understand it even if some twisted extraterrestrial whose native notion of esthetic perfection looked like the inside of an alarm clock wanted to kiss Maestro. She is egregiously beautiful, two-thirds Diane Venora and one third Audrey Hepburn, and sports what must be, even to the most jaded eye, a nearly perfect body whose movements are entirely under her own control. Her high kicks beat those of Eleanor Powell. And when her numbers freeze in tableaux, it would be perfectly okay if she just retained those balletic poses for, oh, say five or six minutes so we can burn the images into our brains. I don't think the human form and the suppleness of which it is capable has ever been displayed more elegantly. Not to put down Fred and Ginger. That's a different ballroom game.The Spanish as spoken is appropriately Argentinian too, for what it's worth. The pronunciation is regional and so is the grammar. I say this out of complete ignorance of the language except for that which comparative linguists tell us. And a chat buddy in Buenos Aires. (Besos a vos, mi compaera).The plot is nothing much. Abstract and arty and colorful. Saura's 8 1/2. Suarez, the benign director of a musical show, falls for Maestro. She is living with a Mafioso who is a dangerous dude, sub specie aeternitatus. But she tells the Mafioso off anyway and stalks off as he shouts after her -- "You're making a big mistake." If it did turn out to be a mistake we don't learn about it. The movie ends happily if trickily.I want to emphasize that the dances are just about everything here. They bear about the same relationship to Lemon and Brown's tango as Fred and Ginger's superbly rehearsed dances do to the twist. There is one number by Maestro in which she does nothing but walk around slowly and strike an occasional pose. It's stunning in it simplicity and sensuousness. And in the duets, the dancers hold each other so close through so many acrobatic movements that, without stretching too much, I can imagine one false step bringing them tumbling to the floor wrapped up in each other.The photography and lighting (by Vittorio Storaro) is superlative and the art direction equally so. Everything takes place in a carefully designed studio with mirrors and stages and painted backdrops scattered around. Sometimes we don't know if we're looking into a mirror or seeing the "real" scene. Nor can we always be sure that what we're watching is taking place in "real" life or in Suarez's imagination -- sometimes the imaginary turns into the real. But none of this detracts from our understanding of the film. The "double" structure is not simple directorial self display, nor is it just more hokum about "what's reality and what's illusion?". It adds visual texture to a film that already has more than a dozen Hollywood monstrosities could hold. It's really art, without quotation marks around it.

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michalis damianou
1998/12/19

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.

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