Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón.
Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter.
In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a tango performance she catches by accident and then seeks out the lead dancer, Verón, hoping he’ll teach her some moves.
The film is the story of that relationship, and while it’s true that Potter isn’t much of an actor, it doesn’t matter very much since it’s really more about power dynamics than character development. Potter arrives and leaves as herself, and so does Verón. In between there is fine dancing – she does know her tango – and some exploration of the different worlds of Potter (where she is the boss) and Verón (in tango the man leads and the woman follows).
Will a feminist like Potter submit to masculine control? Will Verón, who has been promised a role in Potter’s next film, which is of course the one we are watching, submit to Potter’s?
Potter shoots it all black and white, harking back to the heyday of the tango in the early 20th century, and shifts the action from Paris briefly to Argentina and back to Paris, the city of love, where her relationship with Verón becomes carnal, as you might expect with such a sinuous dance.
It’s a midlife crisis movie, really, with the late-40s Potter and the mid-20s Verón in the sort of relationship that probably cannot end well. Like the dance itself it’s a drama about people who are not equal in any way, and as well as being a fabulous dancer, Verón is properly excellent as a Latin cad.
I watched this with my tango-loving aunt, who swayed and almost swooned at several points, and the soundtrack is full of names she recognises more than I do: Astor Piazzolla, one of the modern revivers of tango, Carlos Gardel – one of its first great international stars, plus, I think, The Gotan Project, or some other band who also sensitively update tango with beats, electronica and studio techniques.
The critics were kind to the movie but unkind to Potter – she should not have cast herself was the general gist – and while it’s true that she is pretty wooden in the emotional scenes when she’s meant to be speaking from the heart, she excels at the dancing. And if you’re going to make a movie in which its major protagonist is probably out of her depth for several different reasons then casting yourself does show a certain steely resolve.
Think of Potter as a version of Shirley Valentine, maybe – midlife woman finds herself and is transformed – though Verón and his goatee beard and semi-mullet are not that far from Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.
Considering that the subject matter is quite personal, the film is actually ironically at its best at its most general, in the old school dancehalls where old boys put Sally through her paces, and in a couple of deliberately staged “dance numbers”, one of them an obvious homage to Fred Astaire, in which Verón gets to show how versatile he is.
Strange movie, a mix of the experimental and the entertaining.
The Tango Lesson – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
